Gandhi`s Passion Towards Helping Indians

Mohandas Gandhi was born in Porbandar, a small coastal town in the western region of British ruled India on October 2, 1867. Gandhi’s father was a politician and served as Prime Minister to a number of local Indian Princes. His mother, Putilibai, was Gandhi’s father’s fourth wife. His parents were not well educated but his mother was literate. Despite their educational problems they were well off and owned several houses in Porbandar, and in nearby villages. Because of this they were able to pay for good education for Mohandas .

At age 13, Gandhi was married to a girl of the same age named Kasturbai. After the death of his father, Mohandas’s family sent him to England to study law but he became interested in the philosophy of non violence. He returned to India in 1891, but he did not succeed in the practice of law and he went to South Africa. There he became involved in efforts to end discrimination against the Indian minority. He developed his creed of passive resistance against injustice, “Satyagraha,” meaning truth force, and was frequently jailed as a result of the protests that he led. Soon after launching his monumental Satyagraha “Hold fast to the Truth” movement, he gave up his pleasures vowing to focus all the heat of his passion towards helping India’s emigree and indentured community, win freedom from racial prejudice and discrimination. Gandhis’s passion turned each prison cell he occupied into a self proclaimed “temple” or “palace” even as he taught his self sacrificing yogic spirit to relish the “delicious taste” of fasting, taking pleasure in every pain he suffered for the “common good.” He founded the Natal Indian Congress which commanded an Indian medical corps that fought in the Boer War. Their willingness to endure punishment and jail earned the admiration of people in Gandhi's native India, and eventually won concessions from the Boer and British rulers. By 1914, when Gandhi left South Africa and returned to India, he was known as a holy man: people called him a “Mahatma” or "great soul." Thus his passion to help people thrust him in becoming a leader. Gandhi’s greatest achievement was to unify India by making himself the symbol of unity. It was Gandhi’s person more than the slogans of nationalism and liberation, that united Hindus and Muslims again...

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...out the power of his person, there would have been no India at all. It was Gandhi, the Mahatma who made the people of the subcontinent believe in the idea of an Indian nation; indeed, it was he, the frail, bespectacled figure with the simple clothes and the ready smile, who embodied this idea throughout the long decades of struggle.

To the Indian people, Gandhi gave a nation. To the world, he gave satyagraha, arguably the most revolutionary idea of a long and ravaged century. He showed that political change could be affected by renouncing violence; that unjust laws could be defied peacefully and with a readiness to accept punishment; that "soul-force," as much as armed force, could bring down an empire. He drew this lesson from his readings of the Bible and Tolstoy and the Bhagavad-Gita, and he taught it to Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and countless other political protestors who would follow his example in the years to come. In some sense, Gandhi's greatest achievement lay in his legacy; for his ideals, and the example he provided in living them out, inspired, and continue to inspire, people of all nations to take up the peaceful struggle for freedom from oppression.