ARTICLES : About Maharma Gandhi

Read articles written by very well-known personalities and eminent authors about their views on Gandhi, Gandhi's works, Gandhian philosophy and it's relevance today.


Gandhi Meditating

ARTICLES


About Gandhi
(Dimension of Gandhi)

  1. Gandhi - An Example in Humility and Service
  2. Gandhi's Model of Masculinity in the Backdrop of Colonial India
  3. From Absolute to the Ordinary
  4. Gandhi and Communication: Respecting One's Feelings and Those of The Other
  5. The Journalist in Gandhi
  6. Gandhi's Last Painful Days
  7. The Mahatma As A Management Guru In The New Millennium
  8. What Champaran gave to Gandhi and India's freedom struggle
  9. MAHATMA GANDHI : A real friend
  10. Gandhi, Parchure and Stigma of leprosy
  11. The woman behind the Mahatma
  12. Reflections on Gandhi
  13. Inspired By Mahatma Gandhi's Autobiography
  14. Mahatma Gandhi
  15. In the Early Days with Gandhi
  16. Gandhi's Human Touch
  17. Using And Abusing Gandhi
  18. Gandhi: The Leader
  19. The Sacred Warrior
  20. Gandhi The Prisoner- A Comparison
  21. Are Gandhi And Ford On The Same Road?
  22. Attack on Gandhi
  23. The Essence of Gandhi
  24. Gandhi's Illustrious Antecedents
  25. Ink Notes
  26. Peerless Communicator
  27. Other Gandhis: Aung San Suu Kyi
  28. Gandhi Through The Eyes of The Gita
  29. Gandhi's Source of Inspiration
  30. Tarring The Mahatma
  31. Gandhi, Globalization, and Quality of Life
  32. Gandhi And Globalisation
  33. Gandhi's Revolutionary Genius
  34. Mahatma Gandhi
  35. Who Is Mahatma?
  36. What I Owe To Mahatma Gandhi
  37. The Gentle Revolutionary
  38. Gandhi: The Practical Idealist
  39. Gandhi & Lenin
  40. A Note on Marxist Interpretation of Gandhi
  41. Gandhiji & The World
  42. Gandhi's Legacy
  43. Gandhi's Epic Fast
  44. Gandhi : The Mahatma
  45. How Gandhi Came To Me?
  46. Gandhian Influence on Indian Writing in English
  47. Rural Myth, Urban Reality
  48. August 15, 1947 - From Bondage To Freedom
  49. Mahatma Gandhi and His Contemporary Artists
  50. Gandhi in The Global Village
  51. The Last Day of Mahatma Gandhi
  52. Gandhi: India and Universalism
  53. Gandhi in Sharper Focus
  54. Gandhi on Corresponding Duties/ Rights
  55. Love for Humanity : A Gandhian View
  56. Gandhiji and The Prophet
  57. Mahatma Gandhi - A Protagonist of Peace
  58. Last Words of Mahatma Gandhi
  59. Lessons for Social Work
  60. Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
  61. The Message of Gandhi
  62. Gandhiji's Weeklies : Indian Opinion, Young India, Harijan
  63. M. K. Gandhi- The Student
  64. What Mahatma Gandhi Did To Save Bhagat Singh
  65. How Mahatma Gandhi's martyrdom saved India

M. K. Gandhi- The Student

Vivek Nema

Often I find this kind of information being available as regards Gandhiji as a student – “... Gandhi remained a mediocre student. He shone neither in the classroom nor on the playing field. One of the terminal reports rated him as ‘good at English, fair in Arithmetic and weak in Geography;’ ...”. These suggest that Gandhiji was not a good student but was rather a poor one.
I wish to examine this objectively.
I have a feel this statement comes from people who just copy from his autobiography (The Story of My Experiments with Truth) with much analysis. Gandhiji has written there:
“... My own recollection is that I had not any high regard for my ability. I used to be astonished whenever I won prizes and scholarships ...”
“... Two more reminiscences of my school days are worth recording. I had lost one year because of my marriage, and the teacher wanted me to make good the loss by skipping a class a privilege usually allowed to industrious boys. I therefore had only six months in the third standard and was prompted to the forth after the examinations which are followed by the summer vacation. English became the medium of instruction in most subjects from the fourth standard. I found myself completely at sea. Geometry was a new subject in which I was not particularly strong, and the English medium made it still more difficult for me. The teacher taught the subject very well, but I could not follow him. Often I would lose heart and think of going back to the third standard, feeling that the packing of two years' studies into a single year was too ambitious. But this would discredit not only me, but also the teacher; because, counting on my industry, he had recommended my promotion. So the fear of the double discredit kept me at my post. When however, with much effort I reached the thirteenth proposition of Euclid, the utter simplicity of the subject was suddenly revealed to me. A subject which only required a pure and simple use of one's reasoning powers could not be difficult. Ever since that time geometry has been both easy and interesting for me ...”
The interpreters have got the message from this that Gandhiji was perhaps not a good student... he was not able or competent ... he used to have difficulties in understanding certain subjects... etc.
What they do not understand is that Gandhiji has written “My own recollection is that I had not any high regard for my ability” because of his divine humility and because of his high standards of judging things for himself. Actually if one tried to read between the lines – one could find out more:
... whenever I won prizes and scholarships... – it implies there were occasions when Gandhiji won prizes and scholarships.
... a privilege usually allowed to industrious boys ... – here we have to understand that the teacher judged him industrious, only then he would have cleared him for a promotion (skipping a class). One also has to judge that Gandhi was able to endure this skipping and not only did he pass matriculation, he became a Barrister – studied in England which would have been so rare during those days - period of 1880s. That time a very small percentage of Indians went to school and even a smaller number passed matriculation and only few of them went for further studies that too in England.
... the utter simplicity of the subject was suddenly revealed to me ... – Gandhiji has suggested that he found Geometry simple, only if understood the concepts well, he would have found it simple. If he found Geometry simple he cannot be a mediocre or a dull student at all. ... It is now my opinion that in all Indian curricula of higher education there should be a place for Hindi, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and English, besides of course the vernacular ... – Gandhiji seems to have gone through a tough curriculum of education... he studied these 4 languages at school and would know Gujarati also well which was his mother tongue. It is not so easy studying and knowing 5 languages... certainly not for a mediocre student. Actually Gandhiji knew more languages than these 5 – he had studied some Indian languages simply to be able to read some articles and books he wished to read.
Actually Gandhiji wrote beautiful English, one can find that out by reading his English writings. Those writings reflect the sharp but saintly intellect of the person writing them.
While judging some other personalities like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Churchill, Tolstoy, nobody cares how good they were in their school studies. Why should this benchmark be set for Gandhiji? Do we expect him to be some Physicist or Mathematician etc. in addition to being what he was (so that we would say – yes he was a good student)? When we talk of Bill Gates (the founder of Microsoft Corporation) as being a college drop-out we are excited, we take this to be something heroic and we do quote this with the spirit that he might be poor at studies... do we?