Mohandas Gandhi and His Philosophic Influence.
One of the single most influential people of his time and region, and of the world, was a man known by the name of Mohandas Gandhi. In January 1948, before three pistol shots put an end to his life, Gandhi had been on the political stage for more than fifty years. He had inspired two generations of India patriots, shaken an empire and sparked off a revolution, which was to change the face of Africa and Asia. By the end of 1947 he had lived down much of the suspicion, ridicule, and opposition, which he had to face when he first raised the banner of revolt against racial exclusiveness and imperial domination. His ideas, once dismissed as quaint and utopian, had begun to strike chords in some of the finest minds in the world. .
Though his life had been the continual unfolding of an endless drama, Gandhi himself seemed the least dramatic of men. It would be difficult to imagine a man with fewer trappings of political eminence or with less of the popular image of a heroic figure. With his loincloth, steel-rimmed glasses, rough sandals, a toothless smile, and a voice, which rarely rose above a whisper, he had a disarming humility. He used a stone instead of soap for his bath, wrote his letters on little bits of paper with little stumps of pencils which he could hardly hold between his fingers, shaved with a crude country razor, and ate with a wooden spoon from a prisoner's bowl. He was, if one were to use the words of a Southerner in the Bible Belt, a man who "practiced what he preached.".
Gandhi's deepest strivings were spiritual, but he did not, as had been the custom in his country, retire to a cave in the Himalayas to seek his salvation. He carried his cave within himself. He did not know, he said, any religion apart from human activity. For him the spiritual law did not work in a vacuum, but expressed itself through the ordinary activities of life.
