Bhagat Singh operated alone ,the revolutionaries’ whereabouts were more or less unknown … Gandhi here sat right in the midst of thousands on a beach , & picked a handful of Salt .

The newspapers read : Bhagat Singh & associates BOMB the Legislative Assembly …. Gandhi calls for Swadeshi , Don’t buy foreign goods.

……It isnt hard to figure out who would have been the ‘popular’ one …. HEnce the HOLIDAY ON GANDHI JAYANTI .

What you don’t understand is that Gandhi was the one person responsible for bringing together this vast nation to fight against the British. It is his leadership qualities that made millions chant the freedom manthra.

If you think violence is the road to freedom, you are totally in false heaven. Please do remeber the extreme violent methods used in african countries to get their so called freedom. They are still living in hell.

Feel free to cherish your freedom, but please don’t curse folks who spent their entire life to get you exactly that freedom.

If you want to curse him , fine , let someone take away that independence thing away from you…and then you are free to say whatever the crap your foul mouth wishes.

Aaaand…
Who cares if you sleep naked with 2 or 200 women if it isn’t against their wishes ? Why would you have a problem with that ???

I agree when you say that all history is either a lie or incomplete truth. It is the same history that tells you that Bhagat Singh was an extremist and added much needed momentum to the Indian Freedom Struggle. So if you deny Gandhi his share of historical limelight, you deny the same to Bhagat Singh.

“Is it wasn’t so then how come they never taught us about the great brahamachari experiment Gandhi conducted on himself. To master celibacy he would sleep naked with young girls. In Ved Mehta’s Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles, Mehta emphasizes on the fact that Gandhi’s experiment was an attempt to overpower Jinnah with his spiritual power. We call this dude the Father of the Nation?” –

Now, they never taught you about the ‘Brahamachari’ experiment Gandhi conducted on himself, because

1) Sex education isn’t a part of our syllabus yet
2) 90% of our students cannot look beyond porn and other crap to understand what he was trying to do
3) Gandhi was converted into a vote-garnering symbol by the Congress later in his life and after his death, so historians deftly eliminated the controversial(yet essential) part of his persona in order to render him a father figure
4) All this is my guess, I am not Ramchandra Guha or any authority on History.

And what mister Ved Mehta opines is just another way of posing Gandhi as the anti-thesis of Jinnah, which he was not. His experiments and his theories were more general in nature and not centered around a politician or a country.

If you look at the other fundamental theories that he proposes, Trusteeship and others, you’ll notice that he was very ahead of his times in terms of thinking. Unfortunately most of his life was spent in the petty struggle of freeing a country which he could otherwise have spent in more social experiments and might have got a nobel peace prize for his theories or a booker prize for his books.

Again, when you ridicule his experiments with his family(mind you, any girl at his time would have volunteered to be a part of his experiment, he was an idol then. But he chose his family. Don’t portray him as those swindling yogis who claim freedom from sexual desires and end up on India TV.) ask yourself, would you dare something like that with your family?

Its easy to question whether he had balls or not, but put yourself in his shoes. The whole country and some part of the world are talking about you. If you are even mildly concerned about your reputation, will you risk an experiment like that? Do you have balls for it? And please don’t be ethical here – I will never do something like that. Can you do something like that? Or even imagine that?

And there are bigger sacrifices. Imagine giving up fancy clothes. Imagine going on a hunger strike. Imagine staying with non-violence when everybody else around has proved that violence is the most effective way of gaining freedom. Which brings us to Bhagat Singh.

It is amazing how you quote Gandhi and then misunderstand him.

When you say that – ‘we are made to believe that Gandhi was on this road to non-violence and Bhagat Singh was on a whole different road to violence’ and you quote Gandhi where he ‘clearly’ says that – ‘Bhagat Singh was not a devotee of non-violence, but he did not subscribe to the religion of violence’ – You mix up your understanding of Gandhi.

The question is not whether Gandhi could or wanted to save Bhagat Singh – the real question is whether Bhagat Singh intended to be saved by someone whose influence he had been trying to negate. Look at it this way – Both Bhagat singh and Gandhi wanted one thing – Freedom for the country. Both had different ways and could not compromise with the principles they had set for themselves. So if Bhagat Singh – a symbol of radical revolution, extremism and eye for an eye – was rescued from a death penalty by Gandhi – an exact opposite of all Bhagat preached – would this have made sense.

Would Bhagat Singh have made compromises for an opportunity to live? Of course not. That is too demeaning to think of given everything that Bhagat Singh always stood for. Then why blame Gandhi for not ‘saving’ Bhagat Singh?

Read Gandhi to understand him, at least read what you quote – “These heroes had conquered the fear of death. Let us bow to them a thousand times for their heroism.But we should not imitate their act. In our land of millions of destitute and crippled people, if we take to the practice of seeking justice through murder, there will be a terrifying situation.”

He calls them heroes who have conquered the fear of death, something Gandhi also believed in. But he warns other not to follow their ways. Not because he thought Violence was wrong, but because he knew that very few people can utilize violence the way Bhagat or Sukhdev did.

Understand him when he says that in our lands of millions of destitute and crippled people, violence will lead to a terrifying situation. Something which happened the moment we got our independence.

Let me give you an example. Bhagat Singh threw bombs in an assembly but did not kill anyone. Because he knew the difference between violence and murder. But had those bombs been in any weaklings hands who couldn’t differentiate murder and violence. He would certainly had taken a few firangis down with him. If you see the difference in that, you’ll understand why an understanding of the benefits of non-violence is essential to utilize violence as a potent force.

Gandhi had more balls than you give him credit for. So had Bhagat Singh. The moment you stop seeing them as two opposite forces and start seeing them as two daggers used to kill the same enemy, you’ll understand their actions better.

SatyaGraha and Civil Disobedience were cool and slow. They needed another 200 years but who knows, maybe as a nation we were too immature for independence. Maybe had be gained independence in 2147, Pakistan and Bangladesh and all would still have been a part of us. I am just dreaming, of course no use crying over spilt milk. The problem with Indians has always been co-ordinated effort. Before independence we were divided into Gandhi, Bhagat, Jinnah and like, and post independence we are divided in Maharashtra, UP, OBC, General and so on. At the end of it, we are all scums, some more scum than others.

And the millions on arms and ammunitions is spent because no body gives a rat’s ass to Gandhian farts. But you are right when you say that Non-violence isn’t an answer always. And to say Gandhi alone was responsible for our independence is wrong too. Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Lalaji and even Jinnah were responsible for our independence. Again he was opposed to being called the Father of the Nation or Mahatama. But we are too stupid to understand our heroes. We need someone to throw our brickbats at be it the Father of the Nation, the Father of the Constitution or the Father of the twelve kids.

But why do you enjoy a holiday in his name? There must be a violent way of killing this holiday. Guns are the answer to everything no?

I don’t idolize Gandhi either. My only problem being he needed to be thrown off a train to realize the patriotic side of himself. But then, that is the case with most of us, isn’t it? We go to Australia cursing our country for powercuts and bad roads, want to settle there and earn dollars. But once we get kicked by few people there we are suddenly all Indian – patriotic and brave. Crappy if you ask me, but then we are only human. So was Gandhi.

Hate someone for the right reasons, hatred must not be biased. True hatred is a more potent force than true love. But before you hate someone, understand them.

It was a nice article because it had stuff both for the Gandhi haters and lovers. And something for the impartial too. But you can do better than demeaning his name – Karamchand had nothing to with what his son Mohandas did – Why demean him for the actions of his son?

As for the holiday, enjoy it while it lasts.

Cheers,
Shantanu.