(A) It is satisfying and safe. He's dead and can't defend himself.
(B) I am a contrarian. Whenever I see a million people worshipping an object, I question the quality of that object. Intelligence is not exempt from the laws of statistics. One person is smart. A million people, on average, are dumb.
(C) I have way too much time on my hands.
I have noticed that we Indians tend to glorify our heroes a bit much. Why do we do this? Do we lack heroes? Do we miss having role models? Is this why we concentrate all our lovin' on one individual? Is this why we pick one well-known hombre, inflate his qualities and put him safely up on a pedestal out of reach of all criticism?
Why is Gandhi a "Mahatma"? Why does Subhash Bose not get that honor? Or Khudiram Bose? Or Bhagat Singh? Or Aurobindo Ghosh? Or wasshisname that blew up the British courthouse? It bothers me that a certain, admittedly famous, individual named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi gets so much attention.
That is why I bash Gandhi. Because somebody has to overcompensate, no?
I also think that we lack a certain persepective in thinking about Gandhi and other similarly famous men.
Some perspective, guys, is all I ask. Some perspective.
Gandhi was a man.
A man who contributed to our freedom struggle. Was he a great soul, as the moniker says? He was no more or no less so than the scores of other leaders who also contributed their blood and sweat to the freedom struggle. He was obviously not a coward, as some recent Hindi movies would have us believe. It takes a lot of courage to stand up and not back down from your convictions, even when they are demonstrably wrong on more than one occasion. He was no more a coward than George W. Bush is a coward. But simply being courageous does not make you great.
We humans are not terribly discerning in handing out certificates of greatness. Take as an example, Aleksandros the Macedonian. Pray tell, why do we call him Alexander the Great? To an impartial observer, this particular character would strike me as a man with way too much time and an excellent army (which his father, Prince Philip of Macedon, had painstakingly built up) on his hands. A man who used this army to carve a path of destruction through the Ancient World for no apparent reason other than bragging rights. What legacy did he leave the world? The Hellenic legacy in the east, such as it is, was promptly wiped clean with the Islamic invasion of Persia.
Gandhi was a man.
A man who contributed to our freedom struggle. Was he a great soul, as the moniker says? He was no more or no less so than the scores of other leaders who also contributed their blood and sweat to the freedom struggle. He was obviously not a coward, as some recent Hindi movies would have us believe. It takes a lot of courage to stand up and not back down from your convictions, even when they are demonstrably wrong on more than one occasion. He was no more a coward than George W. Bush is a coward. But simply being courageous does not make you great.
We humans are not terribly discerning in handing out certificates of greatness. Take as an example, Aleksandros the Macedonian. Pray tell, why do we call him Alexander the Great? To an impartial observer, this particular character would strike me as a man with way too much time and an excellent army (which his father, Prince Philip of Macedon, had painstakingly built up) on his hands. A man who used this army to carve a path of destruction through the Ancient World for no apparent reason other than bragging rights. What legacy did he leave the world? The Hellenic legacy in the east, such as it is, was promptly wiped clean with the Islamic invasion of Persia.
Was the size of his empire impressive? Well, first, the size of one's empire does not make one great, it makes one colonial. Second, his empire was quite provincial when compared to the colossal empire that Chengiz Khan and his successors, Ogotai and Kublai, built up. Or compared to the British colonial empire. Even the Mauryan empire comes close in size. And quite frankly, people like Chengiz and his grandson Kublai Khan left a more lasting legacy in China and Russia than Alexander did on the lands he conquered. Same goes for the Brits; they left a mark, and how. So why is Chengiz Khan not billed Chengiz The Great?
Ergo, one must be careful when evaluating a man's reputation of greatness. This applies to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi also.
Yabbut, but he must have been an extremely smart man to have three hundred million people follow him devotedly, I hear some people say.
Sometimes people follow a man not because the man is smart, but because the people are not terribly bright. Take a Laloo Prasad Yadav. Is he smart, because of his unchallenged position in Bihari politics? No, Biharis are dumb, for tolerating him.
Is Jyoti Basu, who lorded it over Bengal for 21 years and paupered it with a defunct ideology, smart? No, Bengalis are f***ing obtuse, for being so easily led. Do not ascribe to greatness what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
2 comments:
Interesting post. I can think of several other reasons for Gandhi-bashing. For one, he seems to have received an undue share of credit for getting Independence for India. Let's not forget that there were heroes in every part of the country doing their bit to help make up the mind of the mighty British empire that being in India any longer was not going to be a good idea. When all of this was done, Gandhi behaved like a typical CEO, taking credit for the whole thing..
In any case, I completely second, third and fourth your sentiments on the topic.
Speaking of taking credit for Independence, let's not forget Nehru. Gandhi was uncoventional and somewhat misguided in a lot of things but he was at least original.
But what about that lackey of his, that uninspired bastard Nehru? Blindly led India down the path of import-substitution ruin. What a telling indictment of his idiotic policy that his own government had to devalue the currency with a gun held to its head, forty years later!
Did nothing about the population. Neglected primary education -- the guys who praise him for setting up the IITs are fundamental idiots. His foreign policy was laughable -- I won't flog it here and waste my time and yours; anybody who is halfway well-read will immediately know what I am talking about.
Why he is not declared a national failure and officially ostracized, I don't know. Instead, his birthday is celebrated as a holiday. Unbelievable, if you ask me. Children whose future he played with are made to sing cute, shrill songs in his memory. The Indian penchant for the celebration of mediocrity at its glorious best!
Are you familiar with the Gertrude Stein phrase "the lost generation"? Well, Nehru spawned an entire lost generation of our own -- my father and yours were part of that lost generation.
Actually, they were the lucky ones because they managed to migrate. It's the ones who stayed behind who stayed lost. I've seen it.
And even they were lucky compared to the millions that he condemned, through his policies, to rummage through our garbage heaps for food.
I've seen it and it has broken my heart every time. A little child going through the garbage outside a wedding hall. Looking for the food that I couldn't eat because it was too much on my plate. Scooping up rice-mixed-with-gunk from the dusty surface of the street and eating it with relish and a look of bliss on her face.
It is only the luck of the draw that I was not that child. It was a random roll of the dice that I was born to a middle-class family. But that child could easily have been me, it could easily have been you. That is J. Nehru's gift to us.
Nehru was a criminal of the worst sort -- the kind you can't convict because there is no law against his kind. I find it sad that he died peacefully in his bed.
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