Post by pim on Mar 5, 2013 0:10:14 GMT 10
This is a biography written by Arthur Herman which looks at the lives of both of those gentlemen. It tracks through their separate upbringings and cultural backgrounds in alternating chapters and then as they advanced in years and careers how their lives impacted on each other. I'm halfway through the book which is around 600 pages long.
The section I'm currently reading describes in detail the ashram where Gandhi lived and the community he led. Personally he sounds like an unsufferable control freak and a very high maintenance individual.
Try this part on p293:
Desai's son Narayan has left a vivid memoir of the ashram and the gallery of personalities who inhabited it in the late 1920s. There was Kasturbai (Gandhi's wife) the busy matriarch who spoiled the children and scolded Gandhi for feeding the guests too much. There was Bhansali, a recluse and former teacher oif French who had takn a twelve year vow of silence. When someone stepped on his foot in the dark, and he cried out involuntaily, he had his lips sewn shut with a copper wire in penance.
There's more. It seems that Gandhi was obsessed with bodily functions. His politics were those of what he called, in Hindi Swaraj which means self-rule, or independence. On the national scale of course that meant Indian independence and an end to the British Raj. But swaraj had a personal dimension and on the personal level it meant "self control". So Gandhi was obsessed with his own diet and the diet of the people around him. It went further. He was so obsessed with bodily functions (he'd taken a vow of celibacy when in his 30s. History doesn't record whether or not his wife Kasturbai was consulted) that his daily greeting was "How are your bowels today?" Apparently Gandhi saw being"regular" as a sign of spiritual health. He claimed that his favourite book, as a law student in London, had been Constipation and Civilzation which set out to demonstrate a link between the corruption of modern life and gastric disorders.
Dunno what he would have made of the Queen's current condition ...
But he would have been a most unpleasant individual to know personally. 
The section I'm currently reading describes in detail the ashram where Gandhi lived and the community he led. Personally he sounds like an unsufferable control freak and a very high maintenance individual.
Try this part on p293:
Desai's son Narayan has left a vivid memoir of the ashram and the gallery of personalities who inhabited it in the late 1920s. There was Kasturbai (Gandhi's wife) the busy matriarch who spoiled the children and scolded Gandhi for feeding the guests too much. There was Bhansali, a recluse and former teacher oif French who had takn a twelve year vow of silence. When someone stepped on his foot in the dark, and he cried out involuntaily, he had his lips sewn shut with a copper wire in penance.
There's more. It seems that Gandhi was obsessed with bodily functions. His politics were those of what he called, in Hindi Swaraj which means self-rule, or independence. On the national scale of course that meant Indian independence and an end to the British Raj. But swaraj had a personal dimension and on the personal level it meant "self control". So Gandhi was obsessed with his own diet and the diet of the people around him. It went further. He was so obsessed with bodily functions (he'd taken a vow of celibacy when in his 30s. History doesn't record whether or not his wife Kasturbai was consulted) that his daily greeting was "How are your bowels today?" Apparently Gandhi saw being"regular" as a sign of spiritual health. He claimed that his favourite book, as a law student in London, had been Constipation and Civilzation which set out to demonstrate a link between the corruption of modern life and gastric disorders.
Dunno what he would have made of the Queen's current condition ...
But he would have been a most unpleasant individual to know personally. 