Real guide of Gandhiji

Created On: 12 July 2015 1:39 PM IST

Every creature under the sun craves for its freedom, but only a few fight to achieve the same. Lack of understanding the situation and fear to fight against the circumstances and reasons for such slavery and submissiveness. Only a few undaunted selves, who do not care for anything except independence, achieve the goal of liberation from humiliation and subordination.(59)

Such a rare personality from the USA had paved a clear path for his future followers like Mahatma Gadhi, Martin Luther King Junior and Nelson Mandela, the greatmen who have fought for liberation of their countrymen. He is none but Henry David Thoreau, the author of "Walden (or Life in the woods)" and some other books and papers.

Thoreau was born on 12th july 1817 at Concard in Massachusetts of USA and died on 6th May 1862, much before the birth of Mahatma Gandhi. But his writings were ever green in the world who like to be liberated from all the dirt of the dubious society.

As his thoughts was much like the saints of our tradition, Mahatma Gandhi had admitted in his autobiography 'my experiments with truth' that Thoreau's writings have influenced him to start fighting against oppression of the ruling class to liberate the rural masses of India.

Mohan Das karamchand Gandhi went to South Africa, to defend the cases of some of his Indian clients as an ordinary advocate. He suffered, along with the natives, wrath of aparthied wrenched by the Whitemen there. In those circumstances had either to return to India or to fight against the ruling roughnecks.

Taking the que from Thoreau's writings, Gandhiji had decided to fight against the unruly government, with a new weapon of non-violence. His stubbornness succeeded in achieving solidarity of majority of localsand the government was finally made to provide some relaxations.

The mantra taught by Thoreau was simplicity, highness at heart and humility before his human counerparts, undaunted spirit to face the foreign ruler and fighting ferociously without a weapon to harm the humanity.

Thoreau's option to go to wood was to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life and live sturdily and spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into corner and reduce it to the lowest terms. The practice of stubbornness proved mohandas as a man above the horijon and he became the hero of the masses in South Africa.

Gandhiji's success in the south Africa had given a great boost the Indian leaders engaged in independence movement Gopalkrishna Gokhale and others had seen in him a great personality to lead the nation towards liberation. On the advise of Gokhale, Gandhiji undertook yatra throughout the country and understood the people and their presumptions.

He took oath to clad himself with a simple dhoti and virtually became a halfnekade phakir. He started rigourous Brahmacharya and seemed like saint in the woods.

That's why people followed him in thousands. His attraction was not in his attire but only in his attitutude. In a nutshell, Gandhiji, as a distant disciple of Thoreau, put all the preachings of his precentor in practice without any deviation.

Gandhiji might have not got Nobel prize but his noble thoughts are lingering in the ears of every human being. Sticking stubbornly to the spirit of the letters in the scriptures he read, and proved Mahatma to be the solitary saint in our soceity.

---K.B.RAMMOHAN