Gandhi Was One of the Greatest Men to Ever Live

I am going to try to answer an interesting question as to who is the greatest man in the world today. In seeking an answer to this inquiry, I predict that people would first instinctively go back to the days of the great wars in history, and go over the names of the men who held positions of vast responsibility and power in that astonishing conflicts, people who succeed in front of their task and, thus, were considered heroes.

However, I turn away from the storm of wars, and from the men who rode that storm to power and place; and I look further for that man who impresses me as the greatest man who lived in the world. A man, who people can surely call the greatest, should be a universal man — a man who combines in perfect balance the supreme qualities of an idealist and a realist, a dreamer and a doer.

The man who satisfies those qualities, I believe is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Indian leader, of the great revolutionary movement against British rule in India. He is better known as Mahatma, called by his own countrymen first, meaning “the Saint”.

Gandhi was born on second October, 1869 in India, of a rich, clever and cultivated family. He was reared as the sons of such families are always reared, possessed of everything that money could buy (Gandhi: A Biography). On September 29, 1888 he went to England to study law at University College London. He took his degree in regular course, returned to India, but failed to become a successful lawyer in Bombay and Rajkot.

At the same time, he already found that religion was coming to have a dominant place within his life. Even before his journey to England, he had taken the vow to abstain from wine, flesh, and sexual intercourse, and on his return to India, his asceticism in...

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...crowds of people were gathering in order to hear his words. He seems to be was a person whom the Indians saw in him, perfect and universal man. He had a simple, altruistically and uncorrupted personality. In his political duties he was a firm realist, consistently working towards a goal of liberation; while on the other hand, he was an idealist, living ever in the pure happiness of the spirit.

Works Cited

"Gandhi: A Biography." Kamat's Potpourri. 4 Jan. 2011. Navajivan Trust. 13 Feb. 2011. .

Holmes, John Haynes. "Mahatma Gandhi: an American Portrait." Harvard Square Library. 2006. Harvard University. 12 Feb. 2011. .

Moncur, Michael. "Mahatma Ghandi Quotations." The Quotations Page. 1994. 12 Feb. 2011. .