Mohandas Gandhi: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
In 1999, Harper Collins Publishers cited Mahatma Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth among one of the one hundred best spiritual books of the 20th century. This book tells us of the formation of one of the most influential and revered personalities of the last millennium. In five parts, it covers his life from early childhood to the beginning of the Non-Cooperation Movement. In its deep introspection, passion for truth, godliness in all things and a consequent concern for personal integrity and love of one’s fellow creatures, it has touched many readers around the globe.
His father’s uprightness, his mother’s piety and strict adherence to the rules of her religion—these become the standard by which young Gandhi measures his own conduct. These dearly held principles are tested against the experiences of every day existence, developing his strong moral character. In Part I we read the candid report of his boyhood struggles to overcome temptations of various kinds. In South Africa he encounters racism and social oppression. He engages in principled opposition to these, and experiments with community living. This becomes the training ground for the historic undertaking—the Indian Freedom Struggle. His vow of celibacy in marriage, his cooperation with the British as relief worker during the Boer war and the World War I are narrated in sections III and IV. Part V narrates the founding of the Satyagraha Ashram in Ahmedabad, the Champaran Satyagraha, and his resistance to the Rowlatt Act.
By then Gandhi has become a man of many parts—newspaper editor, educationist, and a leader whose vision eventually created a great democratic nation. In all his experiments he insists on truth, non-violence and realisation of God. God is truth, and truth can only be realised through ahimsa. It is aspiring after truth that turned him to politics and indeed into all areas of life. Truth, politics, and religion therefore belong together, despite what people claim. With deep humility and a prayerful mind he declares that he seeks to reduce himself to zero and be the last among fellow creatures, and asks readers to join him in prayer to the God of Truth that he may be granted the boon of ahimsa in mind, word, and deed.
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Nelson Mandela: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM (Macdonald Purnell, 1994)
Mandela is to South Africa what Mahatma Gandhi is to India. He spearheaded the anti-apartheid movement and won for his fellow men their freedom and rights. And he helped create a country of racial harmony, avoid a blood bath, which many had feared. Long Walk to Freedom recounts his life as a freedom fighter and the shaper of African destiny. It tells the story of the native people’s struggle against the indignity and brutality of the European hegemony and attain equality and self-determination denied to them for centuries.
Mandela was transformed by the education he received, and this made him realize the vital significance of education as the route to liberation. He became active in the struggle for the rights of Africans and was cruelly treated. Arrested in 1962, he was imprisoned for twenty-six years! In prison he gained the status of a martyr and an icon of human rights. Released in 1990, he was elected the African President of South Africa, in the first multi-racial election the country ever had. The book is an inspiring, passionate epic of the triumph of a man’s determination, suffering, and resilience in the face of severe trials.
A lesson from Mandela: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” Another lesson: “If I do not forgive, I will still be living in a prison (of hatred).”
Mandela insisted, when elected president, that what the country needed was not revenge, but healing. For his noble-minded approach to public life and his lack of bitterness towards those who had ill-treated him (, he became one of the most respected statesmen in the world. No wonder there were over ninety heads of state at his funeral—the largest ever.
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