The Mind of MK Gandhi.

I've always thought highly of MK Gandhi. My unpublished novel, The Last Gandhi Movie, has him as the thematic pivot. I recently read Girja Kumar's BRAHMACHARYA Gandhi & His Women Associates. It perturbed me and gave me serious misgivings. This narrative is based mostly on Gandhi's own writings. In it, the so-called Mahatma comes out as manipulative, pathologically obsessive about sex and sin as well as power-crazed. His logic sounds circuitous, serpentine and often self-contradictory and specious, at times even inane. He apparently played God with the lives of those close to him. He was too intrusive and interfering. His charisma was undoubtedly legendary. If he was obsessive about truth, how come he said/wrote different versions of an event to different people? If he was a god-fearing person, how come he believed the worst of his friends and associates time and again? Also, he was in the habit of praising a person to high heaven for a while and then suddenly cutting the ground from under her feet. He was so deeply involved in and on the centre stage of national politics for most of his adult life. How then did he find the time, the emotional resources and the energy to behave like a virtual puppeteer controlling the lives of those in his fold and under his care? All this seems nothing short of weird to me. His tryst with brahmacharya too is an enigma. He seemingly had an extreme revulsion for sexual intimacy. There was a deep emotional scar left on his psche by his failure to be present at his father's bedside at the moment of his death because he was partaking carnal pleasure with his wife. This is usually trotted out as the reason for his guilt feeling. This reminds me of what Aldous Huxley wrote in Proper Studies: "Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt." And: "An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex." (Attributed by Peter J. Mayhew in Discovering Evolutionary Ecology: Bringing Together Ecology And Evolution. Also attributed to Edgar Wallace. http://digbig.com/4xypc.) In tandem, both seem particularly apt in Gandhi's case. Maybe, Gandhi was a bit like George III in Alan Bennet's dramatic and cinematic versions of his life. In a group reading of Shakespeare's King Lear in the asylum, he suddenly realised why others thought him mad and regained his sanity. http://tinyurl.com/3hqeev. Time for yet another of Huxley's accidentally Gandhi-centric pearl of wisdom (this time from Texts & Pretexts): "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves." On this score, maybe Gandhi was found wanting. And, what about the persistent speculation about Gandhi's tantric leanings as reflected in his brahmacharya experiments with his women associates as guinea pig? There is a cogently reasoned study by Nicholas F. Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho, Was Gandhi a Tantric? http://tinyurl.com/4qdcg2 which nearly convinces one of the likelihood. After reading Girja Kumar's book, taking Gandhi at his own words seems a bit dicey to me. Even if we find him innocent of prurience, we cannot always believe in the consistency of his utterances. Dr Sushila Nayyar told Ved Mehta that "brahmacharya" was a latter-day invention of Gandhi to ward off criticism of his interaction with his female intimates. Earlier, she used to sleep naked with him for reasons of nature cure (p.41 of Girja Kumar's book). What can we make of all this? Perhaps, the answer is as simple as the moral of this Zen tale. Nan-in, a Japanese master of the Meiji era, received a university professor who came to enquire about Zen. When serving his guest tea, Nan-in kept pouring even after the cup overflowed. The professor after watching could contain himself no more: "The cup is overfull. No more will go in." Said Nan-in: "Like this cup, you are full of your own opinions and speculation. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?" Milord, I rest my case.

Curl up in bed with a good book.

This morning, Ujwal was desperately looking for old issues of The Reader's Digest. I asked her why. The reason startled me. A Grade 8 student of hers attending an ICSE school had been asked to write a book review. The condition was the book should not be a "classic". Ujwal was trying to help her find a "book digest" that was appropriate to her level and that she could manage to read over the weekend and write a review of. This is unconscionable sadism on the English teacher's part if you ask me. An 8th grader who probably reads only school books, that too under extreme duress as likely as not, and spends her leisure avidly watching the Idiot Box and gossiping about Hritik Roshan and Salman Khan should not be asked to write a book review. To be a book reviewer, you have first to be a book lover and a book reader. When she was here this summer, I listened to Avantika blithely complaining about having to read Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro and the review she had been asked to write in school. When I ribbed her about Ernest being the greatest American writer and a Nobel Prize winner no less, she didn't seem overly impressed. If you must teach a contemporary 8th grader writing skills, please teach her how to write a better SMS, text message and email. If you must make her write reviews, please ask her to review the latest soaps and movies. I could go on and on foaming at my mouth on the subject. Instead, I will direct you to my earlier pearls of wisdom cast here: http://tinyurl.com/4votxp.

P.S.: By the way, for people like me who actually curl up in bed with a good book (my latest is Girja Kumar's BRAHMACHARYA Gandhi & His Women Associates), there is actually such a thing as a book specially printed sideways to make it easily readable in bed. http://www.bedbooks.net/. The only catch is, they have at present in print only "classics", maybe of the lapsed copyright kind.