Remembering Mahatma Gandhi

The Satyagrah of Modern Era

It’s 2nd October today and the world is remembering Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — Mahatma Gandhi — Gandhi bapu.

I am writing this after a long long time since I realized something today while watching a TV show. The show was celebrating Mahatma Gandhi and had a theme on “Satyagrah” — “Satya” “Agrah”. The story was every character promised to speak only truth and avoid any small or big lie for a day. They started with a high spirit and then incidents started happening, somebody lost a money making opportunity, somebody lost a key customer account in business, somebody lost a trust, somebody lost a good friend or relationship. The question here is — only adopting a hard truth for a day spoiled many things for everyone so how come our own “Gandhi Bapu” managed to consistently maintain his “Satyagrah”? Do we really think that we all can live the life like Bapu used to? Can we really adopt “truth only” lifestyle? I believe we can not live like him and can not adopt the truth in our practice.

Is it that difficult to live by the truth in this practical world? Have we all lost our faith in truthfulness of the matter? No

Do you know why? Because it’s not that we don’t like to become truthful, it’s because we actually do not like to hear the truth on us.

It’s not that people have lost faith in truth, people have lost the appetite to listen to the truth and that is why the world surrounding us is refraining to use the truth.

Mahatma Gandhi was a national leader who was actually a leader and the kind of leader who used to be followed by the nation. The nation used have faith in him and so he could use the truth and actually used it as a weapon in the freedom fighting movements.

The 21st century world has stopped believing in leaders because today we can not have a faith in anyone who could be believed and could be followed. The time has changed and so the world and so the mindset of the people and that mindset does not allow the one to be selfless. Our freedom fighters had put the nation on top of everything and didn’t care about the rest. They could do that just because of fearlessness and that’s their strength as they were selfless.

Fear is the enemy of the truth.

The “Satyagrah” of modern world is not about “Speaking the truth”, it’s about “Listening the truth or Adopting the habit to listen to the truth” whatever flavour it brings — good or bad.

Let us remember Mahatma Gandhi on his birth anniversary by adopting the new context of “Satyagrah” and let us try to bring the change in the different perspective.