Would it work?

Quote:

---

Nonviolence is the law of the human race and is infinitely greater than and superior to brute force. Exercise of nonviolence requires far greater bravery than that of swordsmanship.





Mahatma Gandhi

---

Easy-just take away his MasterCard.

I could "stand a buffalo down" and use non violence, but I will be the first to admit I would probably be standing the wrong way and just get killed. I havent practiced my standing and I use pushfeed slippers that I would just fall out of at the wrong moment

Mahatma Ghandi worhshipped cows!

Anyway, he was talking about fighting the British, which is a damn sight easier than fighting an enraged buffalo

Direct hit Saeed!

Saeed said:

Quote:

---

Mahatma Ghandi worhshipped cows!

---

Yes, and he drank his own urine too.

Not relevant, but interesting...

jpb

I think one should never confuse practice and theory... I am sure that Mehul Kamdar can tell us more about this, but during Gandhi's bigger non-violence civil disobedience campaigns in India, thousends of people were killed and almost all the victims were Indians killed by other Indians. The British victims were very few and those killed by the British were also few. So much for non-violence.(

But one interesting question is: What is civil disobedience against a buffalo?

Regards,
Martin

What ever happened to Gandhi? He made one good film and then just disappeared

Just the sort of cowboy we need to hire to go after Bin Laden and various other terrorists.........

AD

jpb



This is COMPLETELY wrong. The urine drinker was a former Prime Minister of India, Morarji Desai, who held office in the late 1970s for two years. He said that he got this idea from the Bible which shows how deranged he really was!



Mahatma Gandhi was probably the only genuine leader India had in almost 100 years and though he was a devout Hindu, he got one of his sons to convert to Islam and another to become a Christian. I doubt there are any leaders who have that kind of decency in India today. Had he not been assassinated, he wanted to leave India and go to Pakistan and even today more of his descendants live in the USA, South Africa and Canada than India while a couple are minor politicians in India though they are highly respected for their honesty in a country where corruption and madness prevails.



How would I know this? My family website has a page on his association with us in India's history as we set him up with the first funds to start India's first independent university which was not funded by the British and several pages of his autobiography talk about us including at http://www.kamdartree.com/Dr%20PJ%20Mehta.htm which is about my father's great, great uncle who was the clan head at the time and financed him.



Marterius,



Gandhi was a pragmatist and he openly supported Britain during WWII as he realised what a huge problem the Nazis were. He was totally against Gun Control as India was the country where the first instance of guncontrol in history took place after the Sepoy Revolt of 1857 when three Hindu armies fought to bring a Muslim Bahadur Shah Zafar to the throne of undivided India until they were defeated by a combined British-Sikh army as the Sikhs ruled over what is now Pakistan back in those days.



It pained Gandhi to see Hindus and Muslims killing each other in a country where he believed the primary objective was to get the British out - he did not consider them the enemy, he just did not want them ruling over Indians and he believed non violence was a way of getting them out as they were definitley a far better country than Germany was at that time under Hitler.



Now let met get out before I sound like I'm on the political forums.



Good hunting!



Missed out a "great" as PJ Mehta was my father's great uncle's great uncle. Sorry!

very intersting, Mehul

political forum

Edmond,



We had a great relationship with the French as the French enclaves always gave political asylum to Indian revolutionaries during the struggle and even in centuries past, your country helped great Indian patriots like Hyder Ali and his son Tipu sultan.



We never asked your country to leave and France handed the enclaves of Pondicherry, Mahe, Karaikal, Yanam and Chandranagore back to us in 1971 or 72 though French laws prevail there even now. Most people there speak French and there are no taxes on liquor, a French regulation that the rest of the country really appreciates as liquor is taxed at more than 160% in Madras which is just a 2 hour drive away. For 200 or 250 years French taxes and laws would continue there and the residents have the option of extending them even longer.



Thanks for all of this, not just for our freedom struggle but for the cheapest drinking place in (possibly) the whole wide world!



Good hunting!

Mehul,
The point of my post was that what looks fine in theory often looks rather different when tried in practice and some of those involved lacks the qualities of the man who came up with the theories...

Is it correct that Mahatma Gandhi also preferred the British over the Russians for the same reasons as he preferred them over the Germans, and that India otherwise easily could have turned for the worse during the cold war?

What happend with the Sikhs of what later became Pakistan? Are there still a Sikh minority there?

Regards,
Martin

Lloyd,



Gandhi was not a socialist by any means - that was the ideology of his successor Jawaharlal Nehru and Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi. FYI India gained self rule from the British on Aug 15th 1947 and Gandhi was assassinated on Jan 15th 1948. He did not hold any political office of any kind in his whole life.



Indira Gandhi was the wife of Feroze Gandhi and no relative of Mohandas or mahatma Gandhi whom you refer to. She was a certified socialist crook along with her son Rajiv and they were both responsible for making India the near disaster that it became in the 1970s and 1980s.



The quote that you made about it costing huge amounts of money to keep Gandhi poor was by Sarojini Naidu, one of India's first woman Members fo Parliament and an associate of my grandmother Savitaben Kamdar - both had spent time as prisoners wwhen they worked in the freedom struggle. In the short spell after India's independence from the British while he was alive, Gandhi insisted in travelling third class on India's trains and the Congress party insisted in running a third class compartment for him alone - the comment was based on this and it is very easy to take it out of context.

Marterius,

You are absolutely right. During our freedom struggle, both the Communists and some of today's Hindu fascists (including the former Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, some say) were active British collaborators and spied on the satyagrahis as the freedom fighters are called. Gandhi never trusted them and why would he? He hated extremism of all kinds and went out of the way to destroy people like Subhas Chandra Bose who went to Japan and later Germany to fight along with the Nazis.

The Indian support for the Soviet Union during the cold war came during Nixon's rule in the USA as the USA began to warm up to China. India and China had fought a disastrous war in 1962over some of the boder terrotories where India annexed the kingdom of SIkkim and China took Aksai Chin and parts of Arunachal Pradesh which were under Indian administration after the British left. There was a time when India voted against the USA in the UN even more than the Soviet Union did and this ended only after Indira Gandhi and later her son Rajiv were assassinated, something that happens not at all infrequently in India. It has been happening for more than 3500 years...

It was after Rajiv's assassination that India threw away the socialist ideology of the past and openly became a strong US ally which it was until April when a new coalition government including the socialists took over. I do believe, though, that this swing to the left will not prevail as Indians have seen a lot of prosperity in the past 10 years, though I must stop again before this becomes a political thread!

Good hunting!

Mehul,
I have stayed out of the political forum for a while and have no wish to go back, but I regard your post as an objective history lesson (if that is possible) compared to what I have seen there!

Regards,
Martin

Thanks for the compliment, Martin, and I'll try to answer just one part of your earlier post that I missed out on - the Sikhs in Pakistan.

There still are a small number of Sikhs, and also Hindus, Buddhists and Christians in Pakistan though the Christians have been fleeing as they have been the targets of some of the Sunni Islamic groups. There are also a handful of Jain, Zoroastrian and Jewish families there and my mother is a Pakistani Jain. Sikhs have fought in both the Indian and Pakistani armies in our wars and that is not at all surprising as India's Presidents in our first two wars with Pakistan were Muslims - Zakir Hussain and Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed.

The second most important Sikh place of worship is the Gurudwara Nankana Sahib in Lahore, just across the border from Amritsar at Wagah and even during India's many wars with Pakistan, Sikhs were allowed by the Pakistanis to go there to worship. Their biggest place of worship is, of course, the Golden Temple at Amritsar.

Good hunting!