I planned to write a few blogs quoting some extracts from my book Mahatma: A Scientist of the Intuitively Obvious just to reveal to many of my friends as what the book was all about. I have, so far, posted only two blogs and intend to post a few more. While on this job I found that a good number of my friends had some valid questions, much unrelated to the contents of the book, which should not be left unanswered. I am taking up such questions in this blog.
The most important question was why I decided to write about Gandhi when so much has already been written about him. The question itself contains the answer. It indeed is the case that much of the intellect has been used to analyze Gandhi (who had openly declared that he was experimenting to convert the ideal into practical) that anyone attempting to understand him, at best, was left with partial appreciation and partial confusion. It was my strong conviction that Gandhi was a simple person, and hence, a “villager’s mind” must be applied to understand him. I found, I possessed that kind of mind as far as Gandhi was concerned; therefore, I attempted to write the book in my own way. The experience had been very satisfying to me. More than two months have passed since I finished writing, but my process of understanding Gandhi is still continuing.
Gandhi was a human being just as we are. He conducted himself, thought and spoke like a human being. What made him different then? While we accept many things that happen around us and with us as, ‘normal’, he did not. He questioned, tried to find a solution, experimented with the solution and after being convinced of the righteousness of the solution acted courageously. Many who wrote about Gandhi tried to prove some point or the other. I did not adopt any particular line of thinking; I simply relied on his words.
The second question I am supposed to answer was about Gandhi’s idealism. “When he lacked practical outlook in most of the matters what was the use of writing such a book that may not find many readers?” this was the question my close friends and well-wishers asked. There is a proverb in English, ‘when going gets tough, the tough gets going’. We all know this proverb but hardly ‘experience’ it. Only some, who had been lucky or unlucky to get trapped in very difficult circumstances, and then could come out of it through their own efforts, might understand what is meant by this proverb. The adverse circumstance that can be practically managed cannot be called tough circumstances. One has to adopt the ‘ideal path’ of struggling till the end to overcome situations that are really ‘tough’. Gandhi had a natural temperament of identifying himself with those who faced ‘tough’ circumstances, the poor and the oppressed; therefore, he opted to convert what was ideal into practice.
Some of my friends asked me how much time I devoted to studying Gandhi before writing the book. I have two answers to this question. First is, “No time.” I was born after his death; how could I have studied him? The second answer is, “My entire life so far.” That is true. I studied life, my life and that of the others; and I studied whatever I could easily study and understand about what many learned people had thought about human life. The fact is that there is no author who does not use his knowledge and experience of his life in his book.
The last question was about the acceptability of the book. While writing the book I could learn many things from Gandhi. I would say,“If some good has to happen with the help of my book, the God will create conditions and people will read it.”
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