On 30^th January, 1948, few minutes after 5 pm, a man was shot. Three bullets decimated his earthly life and India chose a path different from him. The nation that called him ‘Bapu’, the Father started shooting him repeatedly but like a courageous father who does not quit protecting his children, Mohandas Gandhi refuses to die, like a Boddhisattva who delays his liberation till all have attained it.

Like Bhishma of Mahabharata, he probably chose his death by continuously provoking and antagonizing all those who wallow in hatred and did not believe in peace and unified existence of human race beyond Nation, religion, caste, gender and all such gaps. They killed him and still continue to do it attempting to annihilate ‘Gandhi the thought’.

Their number has multiplied since and percolated even to the uninformed minds, united by hatred for all that Mahatma Gandhi stood for. Buddha pointed ignorance as a cause of sorrow and our times indeed can be defined by ignorance, ironically spread through information technology, the same tool that could have spread peace.

He would have died anyways if not killed but the passive aggression that started in his life time has turned to blatant aggression against him. The whole Nation should own this. The man whose one indication brought the masses rallying behind him is being cursed by modern India for crimes that he did not commit. It was the space created by misdirected followers, the so called Gandhians and the weak politicians in the last decades where hatred walked in. While the world learns from him, we ignore if not insult him. The right hates and the left never understood him. Those who swear by Marx fail to see the commonality. Early Marx was not so much bothered about capitalism as he was concerned by the ‘alienation’ of man and Gandhi’s worry too was alienation and loss of autonomy for human.

Man was a tool for War then he became a tool for wealth and now a tool for data or rather a data for AI, doesn’t it sound familiar? The inequality will foster violence of incalculable proportions not so much at the borders but within our minds. And if this is not enough reason to revisit Mahatma Gandhi than we are not thinking.

But which Gandhi? The politician or the man- The great transformer of human behavior who knew India like his own self. The past only has value for its lessons that can be carried beyond context and hence his politics is past, academics can debate on it but for people we have to know the man, for he had lessons that still can repair the fractures of mind and society.

Where to find him?

However hard Mahatma Gandhi insisted that ‘His life is his message’, his 4 books and communications occupy 100 volumes and why not? After all he interacted with waves after waves of humans and touched their life in every sphere, whether personal, social or political. His first biography was written by Rev. Doke in South Africa in 1906 and his own autobiography ‘My Experiments with Truth’ was written between 1925-29 (it was called experiments truly because Gandhi was experimenting all his life and even after summating his life- in fact after his autobiography, life tested him even further). He did not insist that ‘I know’ for he had faltered and fallen many times only to learn and rise again, small successes encouraged to expand the circle of action from inner self to humanity at large. This lifelong experimentation and application of his chosen precepts and their application in various contexts did bring in his famous inconsistencies that often perplexed even his most ardent follower but that did mot muddle his thinking.

Gandhi’s inner space of mind was light and cleanly organized surprisingly amidst the tsunamis around him., one just has to peep deep into his living spaces and correlate. The mess that people felt arose from their own confusions. But it did not come in a day.

These apparent contradictions and the vastness of his actions remains an allurement to people and pushes them to explore Gandhi. No one passes off without his name when it comes to the human liberty, equality, freedom, violence, nonviolence and concern for the poor. Within oneself Gandhi’s name crosses when one assesses the truth of one’s action or thoughts, the little ‘inner voice’ we often ignore was carefully attended to by Mohandas Gandhi.

This is the reason that even today books and articles on him are pouring every year but millions of words later he still remains an enigma. No biography is complete for the deeper processes of mind however biologically similar in humans, are individually unique. The multiple dimensions and layers of Gandhi has forced the philosophers, historians, rhetoricians, Gandhians, political analysts to choose a lens and come up with writings that focus either on his politics or saintliness, religiosity or spirituality, silence or words, Feminism or anti-, progressive or orthodoxy but very few have gone deep into his mind, even Erikson’s lens is psychoanalytic that does not tell the whole truth. Cognitive analysis or a close heartfelt peep by Eknath Easwaran does tell about the man but most vacillate between hagiography or criticism as people loved or hated him.

They have told a lot and helped us to know the man closely but it has also created a risk. The risk of either deification or decimating him to be a villain, in both cases one does not learn from the life history, it is a rejection at a deep level mired in affection or hatred. We cannot emulate God and we should not emulate devil. This dichotomous approach to Gandhi is a curse that will deprive humanity from a great chance to better human life especially in a time when technology threatens to alienate life and the experience of being a fully realized human. The conditions are almost similar to when Marx wrote about capitalism though the modus has changed yet the exploitation remains. No wonder the mind is compelled to bring in Marx and Gandhi together. Gandhi’s life brings in Ethics as a more important process than moral philosophy and that is Man created. So minds can train themselves in relating to the ‘Other’ – for Gandhi the other extended to the last man.

Politics became both a boon and bane for him. His experiments went beyond any theory and -isms but it rose in the wave of freedom struggle of India but much later it became a cloud that prevents people in seeing him fully and he gets clouded in the history of his politics.

He got a chance to test on himself, create situations or test the validity of non-violence with a population as large as India and lived to see the peak and the fall. His life after his autobiography remains to be fully comprehended because we may need him in near future.

Nehru said that only Gandhi can write his biography probably because he realized that Gandhi lived in the ‘lightness of being’ – for him memory, history, past did not matter much- rather in his defined ‘one step at a time’. He did not get convinced but once done he would not shake and to act or react he had to apply the litmus of ahinsa, truth, love, care, selflessness rather than learn from memory (Buddha knew this too).

One has to truly empathise with this master of empathy to know him and there lies the difficulty. Passing a day with conscious choice of staying in self yet selfless, without malice, anger, hatred, jealousy and without the self-righteous arrogance, seems an impossibility. Indeed he was an Impossible Indian as Faisal Davji says, inconvenient too as Gopal Krishna Gandhi says, but relevant he is.

He was a civilized man, complete with his weaknesses and an ability to be honest with himself and others, a necessary quality to transform. An ability to step out of himself and yet be sure within. His mind knew the vulgarity of violence and posited nonviolence not out of fear but as an act of decency. The great Indian though of Self-restraint, dispossession that is being talked much but never practiced, where greed and need have a blurred boundary, Gandhi brought in a great lesson that is pertinent today more than ever- Kindness, treading the earth softly with fellow human beings.

Like Buddha, Gandhi was looking for solutions to suffering in the deep psyche, one that arises due to cognitive aberrations. It got caught in the wave of freedom struggle but his process shines like a jewel. Even the modern mental health practice resorts to similar concepts beyond its reductionist, fragmented approach. WE can regain the balance by learning the core of Gandhi and Buddha which was not very far from the most revered, Krishna’s word s in Gita.

The religious, the political, the dogmatic, the divisive should be dropped and the Universal psychological process should be rediscovered, re formatted and taught to youth if we strive for sanity. To avoid the nihilistic despair that is engulfing minds has to be sublimated in a deeper meaning.

We are still with cave-man like brain, institutions that have progressed and technology like God. especially when the onslaught of AI will threaten the cognitive capacity and the experiential depth of Homo Sapiens. We need to teach people what it means to be human with all its share of happiness and misery. Else we perish.

It is not people who are fighting and inflicting violence on each other but to each other’s stories. In fact, the human mind is adept at making stories or rather this is the only job it knows. Stories give meaning to otherwise meaningless life, conceptualized as nihilism by philosophers. Meaning is nature’s deceit for human beings’ overgrown neocortex that wants a purpose to self.

But this story is not a single story, we are embedded in a collective story of human kind that is ongoing with biological template unfolding and continuous cultural memory that generates a direction and attention to individual stories as well. Discordant stories that may themselves be illusory but when hardened in thoughts and belief by repetition and reinforcement create a thin veil of collective reality. These condition the brain and make their memory, over time it becomes a meaning even if it is misery, fear, insecurity. The comfort itself sustains it and it explains why people are compelled by thoughts and find it difficult to change belief. Even good people can cause injustice and misery when any change threatens their illusory reality.

Justice, peace, equality are not imaginary goals. The denial of justice is not by evil but by majority demonized by their own unconscious impulses, fear and bad thoughts representing their emotional insecurity.

This is where the deep thought becomes the most important process, a life of knowledge, of expanding the self and interconnectedness to the world. State, NGOs, academician, philosophers, all can guide but it pins down to us – each individual, for their starts the practice, the center of the ripples that can bring change. Tragically it is the same node where systemic violence originates.

And here Gandhi the Man becomes our beacon for he knew the practice, 24 x7 relentlessly, wading through suffering of knowledge for he knew that awareness, compassion and knowledge were the answers of Buddha was asked, but for him, Intention was not enough, sharing was. Indeed what Mahatma Gandhi said becomes very important that the last man in society and not majority is important for peace and justice, if it reaches him we shall thrive together.

We have to get under his skin of Mahatma Gandhi to know him better and learn from him, the same skin that he wanted freedom from. He would allow that because his existence was to improve the human lot.

We still have time to choose.

Dr. Alok Bajpai is a Psychiatrist trained at NIMHANS, Bangalore, working at Kanpur after few stints abroad. Apart from practicing Psychiatry, a consistent focus of his work is with children, adolescent and youth, being associated with various Institutes and schools. His work extends beyond the confines of clinic into freelance teaching of mental health issues and life skills. Psychiatry, Physics, Film, Music, Literature and Teaching are only some of the things that occupy Dr. Alok Bajpai’s wide world. He has been instrumental in putting together many awareness campaigns and workshops – especially with schools and has trained teachers – aiming at increasing sensitivity towards childhood problems, in many Indian cities.

(Cover Photo: Mahatma Gandhi Spinning, Courtesy: commons.wikimedia.org)

BapuBhishmaBoddhisattvaBuddhaBuddhismFather of NationMahatma Gandhi