Mahatma Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchad Gandhi a.k.a Mahatma Gandhi (www.spicasc.net/ mahatma_gandhi.html)

Mohandas Karamchad Gandhi was born in 1869, on Porbandar, Western India. He was indeed a bashful kid who was always avoiding people so he didn’t have to talk to them. By the time he reached the age of 18, he went to London all by himself to study the law. But the shyness of a little child was still remained inside of him.

South Africa was the place that shaped him up. Twenty-one years later, he returned to India, his original country, as a political leader. But then, realizing that his own Indian people were suffering horribly in South Africa, he went back there to defend their rights.

And that’s when I started to admire him.

You know, he did become rich and prosperous, but he gave every bit of it up to live simply and ordinarily. He spread peacefulness to the whole country, developed an anti-violence strategy, and fought the unfairness of law by doing protests without violence. He remained calm without showing any sign of hatred or anger against his opponents. Gandhi was sure he could persuade people who were against him that his struggle was justified and fair, even though he received jail punishment more than three times due to his honesty.

For the next years of his life, Gandhi kept struggling to defend people’s rights, including his own. No matter how many jail sentences he received, he just kept going on. Until finally, his fight ended tragically in the hands of a Hinduism fanatic who shot him to death because he didn’t like the way Gandhi tried to bridge the differences between Muslim and Hindu followers.

Why do I call him my hero? I think it is clear: What he has done is totally heroic and could inspired anyone. Indirectly, he taught me to live a peaceful life, without hatred. He showed me how to grow kindness of heart and spread it to the people. Just by reading his story, I knew how much suffering he had experienced while he continued to fight for justice for his country. But he still showed no sign of hatred.

I took a great lesson from him: the best way to conquer evil and solve problems is by patience and without any violence. That’s why I think he totally deserved to have the name “Mahatma,” which means “noble soul” in Urdu.

And by that, I personally hope that someday, I could do what he did—spreading love and peace to the others. Okay, maybe not in the way like Gandhi did, but still, there are many ways to open the world’s eyes that neither violence nor war should be the answer to anything. The answers are peace, love, serenity, and patience.

And Mahatma Gandhi was the best example of a man who understood that.