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About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 13, 1999)
tE ln-jjnrtlanh (Obaerucr Martin Luther King Jr. Special Edition Jan. 13, I 999 Q27 Nonviolence Or Nonexistence — Gandhi for the 21st Century B y A run G andhi Arun Gandhi is the fifth grandson of India’s late spiri tual leader M ohandas Karam chand “ M ahatm a” Gandhi. I recall when I came to India as a young boy 12 years old in 1946 because I had suffered a lot of humiliation in South Af rica - racial humiliation. At the young age of 10, I was beaten up by some black youths. And both times be cause they didn’t like the color of my skin. 1 was furious. I wanted to grow up and be strong and beat everybody back again. The usual eye-for- an-eye theory. And I think that when my parents decided that it was time to go to India and give me an opportunity to live with Grandfather, hopefully learning something from him. I’m ever grateful to them for having taken that decision. Be cause I think in many ways, the 18 months that I spent with Grandfather at that age laid the foundations of my un derstanding of his philosophy of nonviolence as I grew up. I had the added advantage of having parents who had dedi cated themselves to the phi losophy of nonviolence. They worked in South Africa all their lives fighting apartheid in a nonviolent way. When I went to India at that age with all that anger pent up in me, the first lesson that Grandfather taught me was how to deal with anger. And he did is so beautifully, he explained it in such simple terms even for a young person to understand. The profoundness of his phi losophy of nonviolence: it’s not just the non-use of physi cal force, as we assume. It’s much more. It’s an attitude, a way of life. The best way to understand it is to understand violence, to understand that we practice violence in two basic forms. There is the physical form, physical vio lence - the murders, rapes, killings, wars. All the physical manifestations of violence that we see in life. And there is the passive violence that we prac tice all the time - the hate, the anger, the prejudices, the op pressions, suppression for economic reasons, social, po litical, cultural. All these little things that we practice in our lives - the passive violence. The exclusivity that we prac tice. For one reason or an other we are excluding people from our life. It is that which causes anger and the anger then results in physical vio lence. Gandhi described his phi losophy as Satyagraha. It’s a combination of two words: Saty m eaning truths and Agraha in one sense meaning false. I say one sense because the common translation of the word S aty ag rah a is truth/ false. That is the literal trans lation. But I don’t think that is what Gandhi meant. He believed that nobody re ally knows the truths. We have to search for them. Life is one long search for Truths. So I translate his Satyagraha to mean the pursuit of truths, not truth/falsehood. The fourth aspect of his phi losophy was Sw araj. Now that again is a combination of two words - Swa meaning self and Raj meaning freedom. This has been translated to mean free dom in the political sense. He felt that we could gain our political freedom and yet not be totally free. We can see that today, we here in the US who claim to have our indepen dence. We have it only in the political sense, not in the eco nomic sense, not in the cul tural sense. Gandhi used to believe that many of us had the ambitions of changing the whole world. And when we realized that we couldn’t achieve it, we would give up and do nothing about it. And that is a tragedy be cause we may not be able to change the whole world but we can certainly change our selves, and change people around us. And when we begin to do that, the world will take care of itself. I’m not here to suggest to you that his philosophy is the only philosophy that we should look at. There are many other philosophies, there are many other nonviolent ways in which we can deal with issues. We should have an open mind to all of this. And that was one other lesson that I learned from him. He said your mind should al ways be like a room with many open windows. Let the breeze flow in from all the windows, but refuse to be blown away by any one of them. And that is what I would urge all of you to do today. Keep an open mind. Discuss this without anger and emotions and let us see how we can incorporate all these phi losophies into our lives and how we can bring about a change so that we don’t carry this gar bage of violence into the next century. Let’s leave the violence in the 20"' century and begin the 21” century as people who are more peaceful, loving and able to live in harmony. Mahatma Ghandi and his wife, Kasturbai Artwork by Lawrence Levy Menamn! 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