Podcast
Short History Of...
The author, Bindu Puri, is a professor of contemporary Indian philosophy at Jawahalal Nehru University, New Delhi. He discussed how Gandhi, as a young man, felt compelled to lie about eating meat, and how the guilt he felt about this was a significant factor in his later commitment to nonviolence.
He takes up with a boy who convinces him that the English are strong because they eat meat and that's why they have been able to colonize the Indians. So he went to a lonely spot by the river and in s...
— Episode: Mahatma Gandhi
Episode: Mahatma Gandhi
The author, Bindu Puri, is a professor of contemporary Indian philosophy at Jawahalal Nehru University, New Delhi. He discussed how Gandhi, as a young man, felt compelled to lie about eating meat, and how the guilt he felt about this was a significant factor in his later commitment to nonviolence.
He takes up with a boy who convinces him that the English are strong because they eat meat and that's why they have been able to colonize the Indians. So he went to a lonely spot by the river and in secret he had meat. But he couldn't relish it, he had horrible nightmares.
What he found unbearable was the lying to his parents because there was a lot of lying involved. So he wrote a letter to his father and his father on receiving the letter cried.
And when he cried he felt that he learned the first lesson in non-violence. What's that lesson? That love converts and transforms. And therefore his father's weeping transformed him more than any shouting that the father might have done.
All the struggles that he had with desire, with lust are recorded most minutely by him. This kind of a lust had a deep impact on his psyche and the impact you can kind of see happened because of some incident that took place and this was the death of his father.
His father was sick and though he used to look after his father a lot on one occasion his uncle came to relieve him and he went to his wife. He later on really regretted it that I could have been holding the hand of my father when my father passed.