Bapu’s own words more fun

Parvinder Dalal       

HISTORY of the world is but the biography of great men,’ said Thomas Carlyle, and this, I thought, would be the beginning of my lecture that day. After an engaging discussion on Nirmal Verma’s views on ‘language and national identity’ in the previous lecture, I believed the classroom environment would be equally charged up to receive the autobiographical excerpt of our national hero, Mahatma Gandhi. My personal interest in the autobiography studies was adding to my optimism which culminated into a broad smile as I entered the classroom. A smile is positively contagious and I could see its effect on almost 70 undergraduate faces. I borrowed this smile from the cover of Bapu’s My Experiments with Truth, which I was carrying in one hand. 

As I was about to begin, a student stood up and annoyingly claimed, ‘Sir, we know everything about him, let us read the next chapter.’ His statement sounded blasphemous to me, but I maintained my composure for the sake of the person I had planned to talk about. I took the student’s remark as a challenge and resolved to offer something new about Gandhi. As an ‘experiment’, I started reading Albert Einstein’s views on the global leader: ‘Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood.’ Making no difference to the students’ enthusiasm, the statement proved that the scientist was right. In another attempt, striking the cord of topicality, I mentioned the Swacch Bharat Abhiyan and its association with Mahatma Gandhi, but the campaign had already become a household fact due to its extensive coverage on television and radio. 

Partly defeated, I returned to the original task and started reading the autobiographical excerpt from Gandhi’s autobiography. Making eye contact with a few interested students, I half-heartedly related a few anecdotes about Bapu’s stay in England. As Gandhi was caricaturing himself through these anecdotes, I noticed that the smiles were conspicuously returning on the students’ faces. Realising the fallacy on my part, I enthusiastically read another anecdote from the excerpt, ‘While in India, the mirror had been a luxury permitted on the days when the family barber gave me a shave. Here I wasted ten minutes every day before a huge mirror, watching myself arranging my tie and parting my hair in the correct fashion.’ The students were discovering a new Mahatma, ‘in flesh and blood’. My attempts to create an aura around Mahatma Gandhi through Thomas Carlyle and Albert Einstein were futile, and perhaps, too insignificant compared to Mahatma’s autobiographical honesty. Gandhi’s own words would last longer than any ‘words on him’.