A gloomy reverie after watching the film Gandhi

I watched the film Gandhi yesterday. At the end of the film, I was left with a wistful feeling of remorse and regret for having missed out on something all these years. Our history books are a load of trash. They talk about an old, thin man walking across a state with a stick to pick up a handful of salt. They talk about him shaking an empire with a pinch of salt. They do not talk about the political, intellectual, philosophical and the ideological significance of what that meant. People talk about philosophies, about the ideal state of being for a man and about the impact something like that could cause on humanity. Gandhi lived it. He was a trained lawyer and a man who truly understood laws - of humans and of humanity. He put them to use. He contemplated, thought and understood his world. He understood thoroughly, what is good and what is bad about it. He calmly digested it and came up with a way out of the peril. Most people spend a lifetime getting to this point. Gandhi got there in his youth and then spent a lifetime applying his understanding and making use of the way he had found. Everything he did had his philosophy and ideology attached to it. Everything he ever said or asked of people had the same message to it. There never was a clearer thought leader. If there ever was a man that deserved to have a religion dedicated to, it was Gandhi. The mere magnitude of the extent to which his thoughts and understanding went is staggering. To think that he was a man who could still remain practical and pragmatic enough to apply it in a manner that shakes an entire nation out of its slumber and brings millions of people together like a family is simply confounding.

The movie brought tears to my eyes. Not because Gandhi died or he died the way he did - at the hands of those he loved more than anything else; emotionally and intellectually. It is the irony of the whole situation today that is more than I can take. Gandhi does have a religion after all. Its called Politics. India's politics is exactly the representation of what happens when a man of massive intellect and the power to lead is born, causes his immeasurable impact, propounds a philosophy for a whole people to live by, and then dies. A religion is born out of it and like every other religion, over time, its followers become dumber and dumber, the core values that it was built upon get eroded one by one until the day when all that is left of it is a carcass by which it is hardly identifiable any more. Every religion in the world has faced this - people dressing women in black gowns to cover them head to toe, offering rivers worth of milk to stone idols, refuting a human being's right to his sexual orientation in the name of god and many other examples all stand to show that the original philosophy that the thought leaders of that religion propounded has been lost, construed, confused, mixed up and eroded by men who stood to gain by it. Today's Indian politics is exactly that: because Gandhi wore khadi, let us wear khadi. Let us travel around in ambassadors and wear ethnic dresses. It doesn't matter that Gandhi was making a point - that one should make one's own clothes and wear them, making one independent in the true sense. Swaraj. No, it is now enough to wear imported khadi kurta pyjamas and sarees and strut around as if that was a uniform that the thought leader decreed all followers to wear, without question, without understanding the philosophy behind it. Just like brahmins even today walk around bare chested and in dhotis only when conducting poojas and then immediately dress up afterwards in regular clothes.

For a long time, I used to think that the world is in its state because there never really was born a man that could change it. There never was any one person who could cause an impact large enough to change the ideology of a huge mass of people. I thought that was impossible. Perhaps the right ingredients came and went in the shape of men over time but they never really got the chance to come together to make the impact. I thought if some day, due to some advances of technology or human intellect, a man or a group of men do come into being who have the power to change the world in the right way, and they do end up with the right tools in their hands at the right time, then the world will turn around. I never really bought into the philosophy of 'change starts in one's home first'. It is simply stupid to change only one's own ways hoping that others will notice and change theirs. No. Others will notice, think of you as a fool and take advantage. Worlds change only by revolutions. Today, I broke down because I realized that for India, that moment came and went. Gandhi was that revolution for India. Gandhi was the man who had the intellect, the understanding and the capability to amass that power over people's hearts that could turn a nation around. And turn around, he did. Except that he died and the nation kept spinning until it ended up facing the wrong way again. He was right - the country was not ready for his kind of freedom when he brought the revolution on. He was right in thinking that he failed because he really did fail. If Gandhi could be likened to a chef, it is as if he tried to flip the omlette before it was completely ready to be lifted. The result? the omlette broke and the whole meal was a mess.