GANDHI REMAINS YET THE ONE HOPE FOR AN INSANE WORLD

Gandhi may be flawed in his philosophy, naive in its applications, but we must still listen to his voice of sanity in an insane world facing destruction. In this nuclear age where war holds out the prospect of eventual annihilation, Gandhi shines as the beacon of peace and enlightenment and as a perennial source of inspiration to resettle our course and move on in the direction of all that is good and wise and becoming of our inherent divinity.

Notwithstanding the perfidies of the times to which the Mahatma stooped in those turbulent days of the freedom struggle when he sidelined Netaji in the most nefarious manner quite not in keeping with his professed moral standards, Gandhi yet remains the one hope of a civilisation losing its moorings in a progressively perverse world and heading straight towards destruction.

While we in India may engage in heated discussions about the many anomalies of Gandhism and the consequences of his horrendous mistakes, nay, downright blunders fraught with terrible ignorance of the way things work in the world of international politics and for which we continue till date to pay such a terrible price, the Mahatma, nonetheless, has a wider message for all of humanity which man may ignore at his own peril and will be well-advised to heed while yet there is time to salvage what is left of the chances of saving civilisation and rebuilding it towards the end of a glorious global renaissance.

The real Gandhi of history has become much covered up by the messianic myth grown overtime about him and it cannot be gainsaid that we can dispense with either, for such myths have magnified the personalities of all prophets and messengers inevitably and Gandhi can be no exception to it. However, an objective analysis of his philosophy, its practicability and pertinence needs to be undertaken with a scientific rigour for Gandhi to contribute positively to human well-being in the real sense of the term and not in some vague emotional way whose validity lies only in the devout's claims but not in terms of concrete constructive output.

While India keeps on dishing out the Gandhi brand before the international community in an insincere mode which is such an insult to the one she has chosen to call the 'Father of the Nation', the world, one hopes, is slowly beginning to realise the historical significance of Gandhi in this age of cataclysmic warfare and dictatorial genocide, a pertinence which is growing by the day and must envelop human consciousness if humanity is to survive the aggressive challenges of geopolitics of the day without committing itself to total annihilation.