'The whole world is but one family' - Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Australia

arises, indeed becomes imperative. In Gandhi’s
life there were many moments of abandonment,
both by his colleagues and compatriots but more
by the high expectations that he had set out for
himself and for those who cared to journey with
him in search for truth and steadfastness. But
while at some points he was full of remorse and
a deep sense of failure, at no point did he give
up putting up a valiant struggle for the values he
stood for.
It was through this combination of transparency
about one’s travails, trials, and tabulations
as well as of interventions through ceaseless
“experiments” and by sharing them with
one’s fellow-beings through a unique style of
communication that Gandhi was able to relate to
the world he lived in and in the process seek to
remake it that his singular contribution lay, and
it is precisely in this respect that the world we
are contemporaneously placed in is found to be
deeply lacking. Hence the crisis of accountability
on the one hand and a deep sense of alienation
and anomie on the other. The world we live in is
one characterized by an all-round decline in the
democratic spirit and its moral basis—even while
so many nations adopt an apparently democratic
form of government—and one in which national and
international elites are increasingly living in fear and
insecurity, surrounding themselves with a massive
apparatus of security, separating them from their
own peoples, sharply reducing a sense of identity and
community with them, not to speak of love for one’s
fellow beings and service of them based on love on
which Gandhi laid so much stress.
Gandhi was and remains a communicator par
excellance, making his presence felt far and wide, in
his own country and beyond, a kind of village bard
writ large over the expanse of the whole of human
civilization, utilizing an idiom and a language that he
himself created, cutting across the divides of cultures,
of tradition and modernity, reinterpreting both and
producing a new cross-fertilization across them. And
he has not ceased to do so almost half a century after
he physically left us, and today also in a language
and idiom that is unique and characteristically his
own which many of us are still trying to decipher and
deconstruct, especially of late when he seems to be
looking once again at us with his uncanny, piercing
eyes, from behind his daunting pair of spectacles.
Whereas Gandhi himself strove, both in his
fundamental thinking and in his activist encounters
with reality, to wrestle simultaneously with larger
civilizational and cosmic challenges and the hereand-now
issues that were crying out for response and
resolution, I think it would be a mistake on our part
to accept or dismiss him merely on the basis of the
immediate issues he faced, sought his best to deal
with and, as with many other great men and women,
ultimately failed to resolve. Perhaps the real task lies
elsewhere: trying to grapple with the immediate both
in the present and at same time by seeking to change
the contours of the same at large, of the cultural and
civilizational encounters engulfing its journey through
time, through which alone, in the final analysis, the
mundane and the immediate issues could be effectively
dealt with. Without changing the former, the handling
of the latter would remain too adhocism and unable to
hold against the diverse currents sweeping humanity.
Even if these latter temporarily produce “solutions,”
these cannot last for long and will recur once again,
perhaps in more vicious forms. This was the import of
Gandhi’s holistic and unified approach. Towards the
end, he felt he failed to carry through his mission in
life. But, then, that is the whole charm and meaning
of the great moulders of the modern world—as indeed
was in the ages gone by and especially of those who
do not accept the world as it existed and were seeking
ways of refashioning it after a new yearning for both
comprehension and change and a new vision and idea
of the world as it should be. If in the process they
“fail” to solve problems of an immediate kind, it only
underscores tenacity of certain kinds of problems,
reflecting the persisting paradoxes and traumas that
inform the human enterprise even while struggling
to keep hope alive straining one’s utmost to face up
the many tests and trials that continue to beseech that
enterprise—then, now, and in the times that lie ahead.
In the years to come, and may be right into the next
millennium—as it unfolds this state of affairs is