In his autobiography, Gandhi devotes an entire chapter to his social anxiety, my adaptation of which you read at the beginning of this book. He wrote that as a young man, “I hesitated whenever I had to face strange audiences and avoided making a speech whenever I could.” And his anxiety wasn’t limited to public speaking: “Even when I paid a social call, the presence of half a dozen or more people would strike me dumb.” Gandhi, who earlier in life couldn’t even give a toast, would, in 1947, give a speech to a live audience of more than twenty thousand people.
