Thinking about Gandhiji

Gandhian ideas are a mix of values, wishes and sacrifices. They are a way of life Gandhiji teaches you, even though he isn’t there anymore; and nudge you to work a little harder each time you see a poor man’s family on the road. Most of them are relevant in today’s lives: some we need the most right now, and some we cannot practice without a really strong will power. 

Certain values seem easy to practice. For example, cleanliness is a part of your daily lives: you don’t live in an unclean home. So why not go one step further, outside the square walls of our house, and start cleaning our Earth, our home, someone we call our mother? The concept of an ecologically sustainable environment was not as important 70 years ago, as it is now. Although people were not conscious of doing it, our traditional lifestyle was an ecologically sustainable way of living. Gandhiji pointed it out and asked people to consciously embrace it in modern times too. Our experiences in the last few decades have proved to us that Gandhiji’s insistence on minimalism and distrust of industrialization was correct. 

Preserving the environment is not only practicing cleanliness, but also supporting indigenous art and small scale, cottage industries that make things by hand or with the help of simple machines, and provide employment to local people. Regarding practicing minimalism, Gandhiji once said, “We have enough for our needs, but not enough for our greed.”  Looking around your place now, you find that everything you have is a need. Is it a need? Or do you think it is a need just because your friends have it? Can you give it up? Or you find that it is impossible? Not everyone can practice minimalism, I myself cannot. But a small try from our side may be a start of solving the economic problem of scarcity and inequality. Even a realisation makes you go one step forward into executing it.

Basic education still remains a priority, but also stays a dream for many in India. However important education may be, getting educated in your mother tongue still remains a difficult ideal to achieve. Especially in tribal or remote areas, it wouldn’t be right to force the children to learn in any other language except their own if it was going to reduce their speed and capacity of learning. This point, of education in one’s mother tongue was emphasized by Gandhiji to defend one’s identity. One must not lose it only because some outsiders step into your land and say that you don’t have an identity without them, their identity is now your identity. What do we do about English then? Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to this question. 

In conclusion, Gandhiji gave us a lot and left us with a lot to think about and a lot is still left to achieve. His most important dream of achieving zero poverty and economic justice still remains incomplete and we must choose to work towards realizing it.