In India you are not simply allowed to be a human if you are famous. You are not treated as one, Oh I am not saying it’s a bad thing, I am saying it’s the WORST. Because when you are famous, there are only two places where you get to reside. One is the sanctorum in people’s heart or the dumpster in their back pocket (I hope you get it).  You are either their God or their worst enemy.  It is a task to be famous, and still expect to be treated as human. For that one needs to understand Indian mind. 

I am reminded of a man who was born, worked and died in this very country who had recognized, analysed and decoded the Indian mind and India as a whole. But his analysis was kept in the last, the highest and the most unreachable shelf, as if it were a sacred thought, just to make sure that the common man never reaches that shelf. We will read articles about how Mahatma was restricted to only photo-frames and currency notes and how he was never thoroughly understood. I would rather go one step ahead and say I am ashamed how we as a society shamelessly used this man as a shield for our wrong doings. Common people break the law and joke about doing so because Mahatma taught them to do so. Politicians accuse each other with the arrows (made from his broken lathi) and wear clothes made out of khadi just to hide their stomachs peeping out. These stomachs are  filled not just with unending stock of shamelessness, it is a belly of injustice, a belly which is mocking the poor. Alas! we used Mahatma in every wrong way possible.

It is now the right time I feel, that we should start following him in the way he wanted. And let us start where he actually wanted the nation to go, ‘the villages.’ We as a nation have ignored the villages so much that ‘गाव वाला’ has now become a word which is used mostly in derogatory sense. A word which represents backwardness, poverty, shabbiness, illiteracy & unhygienic conditions. Our policy makers (not sparing Nehruji here) from day one have taken determined steps to cut-off villages from the urban areas. They have restlessly worked for making two very separate and very visible nations in one Nation i.e. ‘India & Bharat.’ But then a question pops in my mind, what should a common man do for villages? He has his career, his family all happy and settled in an urban area, so what now? The answer is simple, vote very vigilantly for a leader who promises to work for villages too, donate some part of your income to NGOs which actively work in tribal areas. There are many ways you can actively do ‘श्रमदान’ in rural areas. We as a society have completely forgotten that we have immense potential and power.

 Gandhiji was in a way ‘जांबुवंत’ for the pre-independent India. He made the ‘हनुमान’ of Indian people realise what great power as a whole we carry. We can change, we have to change! The mainstream Liberals used Gandhiji as a weapon to attack the left and the right. The Right used him as a target and held him responsible for dividing the country. The Left targeted him as an elitist leader who only sat with Birlas and Sethjis. All these accusations might have earned a rather unfortunate political mileage to their political careers instantly, but they just made India’s way to find the real Mahatma difficult and obscure . It is the time we start the search for Mahatma.

I am very confident that he is within us. We have to start the experiments with truth for truth has changed its attire in the age we live in. We need Gandhi again and that has to emerge from us, from truth. It reminds me of one phrase in Sanskrit which was used in the famous internet series ‘The Sacred Games’ – ‘अहं ब्रम्हास्मि’ (I am brahma)