Additional English: 1. Discuss The Relevance of Gandhi As An Icon Today

Gandhi Now
Additional English
1. Discuss the relevance of Gandhi as an icon today.
Gandhian Ideas begins with the famous line – 'Straightforward living and high
reasoning'. Itself is likewise reminiscent of how contemplations of an individual
have a significant part in forming his/her life. That is why Gandhi gives off an
impression of being accessible to everybody except in a genuine sense.
Rehearsing it in everyday life is troublesome. For example, staying honest,
open-minded, peaceful, and regarding others in problematic life requires an
incredible degree of responsibility. He gave a tremendous amount to the world
to contemplate and standards for us to imitate. I accept a pioneer who gives us
something worth mulling over to carry on with an insightful life. But Mahatma
Gandhi has strolled the discussion and set only expectations for us.
2. How has the perceptions and perspectives about Gandhi changed over
time?
Ahimsa is the nucleus of Gandhi's ideas. Therefore, the adoption of non-violent
means is compulsory in Gandhi. There is no room for the destruction of
evildoers. It expects the end of evil, not of the evildoer, promotes a win-win
situation for all the parties concerned, not only for one party in the dispute. It
incorporates high morality in it and talks of good, healthy and welfarist human
behaviours. Todays' world has globalized Gandhi's idea so much that his
identity has just become something in the air that could be used in any form for
advertising things that he never even supported.
3. How has Gandhi become "a citizen of the world"? Explain with relevant
examples.
Mahatma Gandhi stays an influential scholar today not just due to his
hypothesis and practice of peacefulness. Still, for his entire life, he likewise
protected political resistance and strict pluralism. Nehru's little girl, Indira
Gandhi, later said, "More than his words, his life was his message." These days,
that message is better regarded outside India. Albert Einstein was one of the
numerous to laud Gandhi's accomplishment. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Dalai
Lama, and all the world's tranquillity developments have emulated his example,
Gandhi, who surrendered cosmopolitanism to acquire a nation has become, in
his unusual after-life, and became the citizen of the world.
4. Do you agree with Salman Rushdie's perspective on Gandhi today?

Discuss with relevant examples.
Rushdie believes that the real message from Gandhi has lost in his own native
country. What's remarkable is how much use has been made of this technique
[of nonviolence worldwide - America, South Africa, all kinds of places. In
many ways, 'The Gandhian idea seems to have been more effective outside of
India than inside it, Rushdie said. 'Had it not been for that, there would not have
been an independence movement.? But Rushdie said Gandhi made some
mistakes. 'There's a notorious mistake where he recommended pacifism to the
Jews against Nazism. And then he understood that that's a mistake, and he de-
recommended it. Gandhi was always against violence had experienced a lot of it
during the independence.
A thin Indian man with not much hair sits alone on a bare floor, wearing
nothing but a loincloth and a pair of cheap spectacles, studying the clutch
of handwritten notes in his hand. The black-and-white photograph takes up
a full page in the newspaper. In the top left-hand corner of the page, in full
colour, is a small rainbow-striped apple. Below this, there's a slangily
American injunction to "Think Different." Such is the present-day power of
international Big Business. Even the greatest of the dead may summarily
be drafted into its image ad campaigns. Once, a half-century ago, this bony
man shaped a nation's struggle for freedom. But that, as they say, is
history. Now Gandhi is modelling for Apple. His thoughts don't count in this
new incarnation. What matters is that he is considered to be "on message,"
in line with the corporate philosophy of Apple. The advertisement is odd
enough to be worth dissecting a little. It is rich in unintentional comedy.
As the photograph itself demonstrates, M.K. Gandhi was a passionate
opponent of modernity and technology, preferring the pencil to the
typewriter, the loincloth to the business suit, the ploughed field to the
belching factory. Had the word processor been invented in his lifetime, he
would almost certainly have found it disgusting. The very term word
processor, with its overly technological ring, is unlikely to have found
favour. "Think Different." Gandhi, in his younger days a sophisticated and
Westernized lawyer, did indeed change his thinking more radically than
most people do. Ghanshyam Das Birla, one of the merchant princes who
backed him, once said, "He was more modern than I. But he made a
conscious decision to go back to the Middle Ages." This is not, presumably,
the revolutionary new direction in thought that the good folks at Apple are
seeking to encourage.
Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract, ahistorical,
postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a freeloading concept,
a part of the available stock of cultural symbols. An image can be
borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented to fit many different purposes, and
the devil with historicity or truth. When it was first released, Richard
Attenborough's much-Oscared movie Gandhi struck me as an example of
this type of unhistorical Western printmaking. Here was Gandhi-as-guru,
purveying that fashionable product, the Wisdom of the East; and Gandhi-
as-Christ, dying (and, before that, frequently going on hunger strike) so that
others might live. His philosophy of nonviolence seemed to work by
embarrassing the British into leaving; freedom could be won, the film
appeared to suggest, by being more moral than your oppressor, whose
moral code could then oblige him to withdraw. But such is the efficacy of
this symbolic Gandhi that the film, for all its simplifications and
Hollywoodizations, had a powerful and positive effect on many
contemporary freedom struggles. South African antiapartheid campaigners
and democratic voices all over South America have raved to me about the
film's galvanizing products. This posthumous, exalted "international
Gandhi" has become a totem of real inspirational force.

Additional English: 1. Discuss The Relevance of Gandhi As An Icon Today

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Additional English: 1. Discuss The Relevance of Gandhi As An Icon Today

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Additional English: 1. Discuss The Relevance of Gandhi As An Icon Today

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Gandhi Now

4. Do you agree with Salman Rushdie's perspective on Gandhi today?

You might also like