Thursday, October 2, 2008

Happy Birthday to the Mahatma

Gandhi's Shoe

While boarding a moving train one day, one of Mohandas Gandhi's shoes slipped off and fell upon the track. As he was unable to retrieve it, Gandhi - to the astonishment of his fellow travelers - calmly removed his other shoe and threw it down the track to where the first had landed. "The poor man who finds the shoe lying on the track," Gandhi explained, "will now have a pair he can use."


Optimist

In 1910, Mahatma Gandhi was sent to prison by South African prime minister Jan Smuts for leading a passive resistance campaign opposing discrimination aganst Indians in Transvaal. From his jail in Bloemfontein, Gandhi sent Smuts a letter offering his "sincere regards." "The prospect of uninterrupted study for at least a year," he declared, "fills me with joy."

Gone in a puff

Mahatma Gandhi upbraided smokers for misusing their nostrils as chimneys. That Gandhi secretly puffed in his school was and was weighed down by remorse is recorded by Robert Payne in his immensely readable Life and Death Of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1924 Gandhiji wrote an article in Young India objecting to the issue of a new brand of cigarettes by the late N.S.T Chari called "Gandhi Cigarettes". Chari at once renamed his cigarettes as "Silver Cloud" and as newspaper editor Pothan Joseph quipped "sales dropped and it melted like clouds in the silver sky."

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G
o U.P.A. !! While the new smoking law seems exciting, I really do hope it is implemented because half the wonderful laws are lost in implementation and the other laws are just plain stupid.

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And Importantly, Arnab Dada-:


Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag (Happy Birthday)





(I have a sneaky feeling this impression will not be appreciated in today's hypersensitive environment. tsk tsk tsk)



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1 comment:

j said...

nice post.. I had never heard the shoe story before.. i think its amazing how he used to think.. I don't we can ever do that..