|
Sunday, February 13, 2000 |
 |
Feedback |
 |
|
His
wisdom is timeless
APROPOS of Bharat Dogra’s
article "Now we need him more than ever before"
(January 30), as India looks back at the end of the
millennium she can justly claim that one of the most
significant figures of the last century was an Indian,
Mahatma Gandhi, known the world over, even by those for
whom British imperialism is a brief page in a history
book. What Gandhi himself would have said of the 20th
century and of the prospects of the 21st is much more
debatable, for in reality he was in no way
"representative" of the times in which he lived
and was in so many ways profoundly out of tune with his
contemporaries.
Gandhi insisted that to
be a genuinely human one has to recognise that at
one’s core is a spiritual capacity, and that, to
quote another seminal religious figure, "man does
not live by bread alone". Because he was undogmatic
and unsectarian, yet evidently inspired by a spiritual
conviction, Gandhi has become a beacon for many in a
secular world who search for spiritual truth yet do not
find it in conventional religious places.
|
