"Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May" is a poem by Robert Herrick. This poem portrays our existence on earth, and that people age as life goes on, and everything becomes boundless. Herrick here urges people to take advantage of youth and energy while they may! The poem is in the genre of carpe diem, to seize the day.

Friday, June 15, 2007

Great story on Gandhism

I received this by email earlier this week, and thought of sharing it with you all :-)
Ansam
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Dr. Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and founder of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Non violence, in his June 9 lecture at the
University of Puerto Rico, shared the following story:


I was 16 years old and living with my parents at the institute my grandfather had founded 18 miles outside of Durban, South Africa, in the middle of the sugar plantations. We were deep in the country and had no neighbors, so my two sisters and I would always look forward to going to town to visit friends or go to the movies.


One day, my father asked me to drive him to town for an all-day conference, and I jumped at the chance. Since I was going to town, my mother gave me a list of groceries she needed and, since I had all day in town, my father asked me to take care of several pending chores, such as getting the car serviced.


When I dropped my father off that morning, he said, "I will meet you here at 5:00 p.m., and we will go home together."


After hurriedly completing my chores, I went straight to the nearest movie theatre. I got so engrossed in a John Wayne double-feature that I
forgot the time. It was 5:30 before I remembered. By the time I ran to the garage and got the car and hurried to where my father was
waitingfor me, it was almost 6:00.

He anxiously asked me, "Why were you late?"


I was so ashamed of telling him I was watching a John Wayne western movie that I said, "The car wasn't ready, so I had to wait," not
realizing that he had already called the garage. When he caught me in the lie, he said: "There's something wrong in the way I brought you up that didn't give you the confidence to tell me the truth. In order to figure out where I went wrong with you, I'm going to walk home 18 miles and think about it."

So, dressed in his suit and dress shoes, he began to walk home in the dark on mostly unpaved, unlit roads.


I couldn't leave him, so for five-and-a-half hours I drove behind him, watching my father go through this agony for a stupid lie that I uttered. I decided then and there that I was never going to lie again.

I often think about that episode and wonder, if he had punished me the way we punish our children, whether I would have learned a lesson at all. I don't think so. I would have suffered the punishment and gone on doing the same thing. But this single non-violent action was so powerful that it is still as if it happened yesterday. That is the power of non-violence.

6 comments:

shoosha said...

touching story, violence doesnt lead to anywhere. a non violent approach is always the best ;)

Ansam said...

shoosha.. I cant agree more

Grey said...

Oh ! those good old days ! If it was today fathers will walking everyday and sons won't even be sorry for it. Its a shame but being a Indian i have to say Gandhism has become movie material only [ lage raho munna bai ] and doesnt exist anymore...

Anonymous said...

thats a great story,...

but i still think some kids today need to have the shit smacked out of them.

Ansam said...

happy wolf-
True... time changes many things

skunk-
LOL yeah I hear ya! some kids are so so so annoying

Anonymous said...

What did Mahatma Gandhi REALLY believe?

http://gandhism.net

Gandhi was hired to serve as legal adviser to wealthy Indian traders in Colonial South Africa in 1893. He arrived there prior to Apartheid, but during a time when the nation still suffered severe political unrest and racial segregation. Gandhi soon initiated a movement for the creation of a third entrance to the Durban, South Africa post office entrance. The Durban post office had two doors - one for blacks and Indians and another for whites. Being Indian, Gandhi was of course required to share a door with black South Africans, which deeply offended him.

In his Collected Works (CWMG), Vol. I, pp. 367-368, Gandhi wrote: "In the Durban Post and telegraph offices there were separate entrances for natives and Asiatics and Europeans. We felt the indignity too much and many respectable Indians were insulted and called all sorts of names by the clerks at the counter. We petitioned the authorities to do away with the invidious distinction and they have now provided three separate entrances for natives, Asiatics, and Europeans."

Note: All quotes are from the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG).

"When one reflects that the conception of Brahmanism, with its poetic and mysterious mythology, took its rise in the land of the 'Coolie trader,' that in that land 24 centuries ago, the almost divine Buddha taught and practised the glorious doctrine of self-sacrifice, and that it was from the plains and mountains of that weird old country that we have derived the fundamental truths of the very language we speak, one cannot but help regretting that the children of such a race should be treated as equals of the children of black heathendom and outer darkness."
>>Reference: Vol. I, p. 225

"Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness."
>>Reference: Vol. I, pp. 409-410

"The £3 tax is merely a penalty for wearing the brown skin and it would appear that, whereas Kaffirs are taxed because they do not work at all or sufficiently, we are to be taxed evidently because we work too much, the only thing in common between the two being the absence of the white skin."
>>Reference: Vol. III, p. 74

"The British rulers take us to be so lowly and ignorant that they assume that, like the Kaffirs who can be pleased with toys and pins, we can also be fobbed off with trinkets."
>>Reference: Vol. VIII, p. 167

http://gandhism.net

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