The Grandson of Gandhi Speaks the Truth

I had the privilege last week of meeting Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. I asked him to write a piece for our blog about anger and violence. He shared a story about when he was younger and a lesson his grandfather taught him that is very powerful.

"When I was living with Grandfather I threw a three inch butt of a pencil [away] because I thought I deserved a better, longer pencil to work with. Instead of giving me a new pencil my grandfather made me go out and search for the one I discarded. It took me about two hours to find it and then he taught me two lessons:

First, that even in the making of little things like a pencil we use the world's scarce natural resources and when we waste them we are committing violence against nature.

Second, rich people and rich nations over consume the resources of the world, depriving others of these resources who then have to live in poverty--that is violence against humanity.

To make me understand this lesson properly, he made me build a genealogical tree of violence, with Physical Violence and Passive Violence as the two branches.  Each day I had to examine and analyze everything I had experienced during the day--things that I may have done or experienced--seen or read about. Then I had to place them in the appropriate places on the tree.

Physical violence was easy to define--they are all the acts of violence in which physical force is used. Murders, rapes, wars, killings etc., to name a few. 

Passive violence was more difficult largely because this is the kind of violence no one is aware of. Wasting resources or food, discrimination, oppression, greed and the thousands of things that we do every day which hurt people some where. 

The one question I had to ask myself was: If the action I am contemplating was done to me would I feel happy or would it hurt me? If I concluded that it would hurt then that was passive violence. 

Within a few months I filled a whole wall in my room with acts of passive violence. Then Grandfather explained the connection between the two. The Passive Violence that we individually and as a society commit causes anger in the victim. And the victim then resorts to physical violence to either get justice or get by force what he or she is denied legitimately. 

What this introspective exercise revealed to me was that we are in the throes of a deep-rooted culture of violence that brings out the worst in humanity. This culture of violence has affected our speech, sports, entertainment, education, religion, science, in fact every aspect of our lives.  It is a cancer that is destroying our humanity from within."

Arun recently wrote a children's book called Grandfather Gandhi.