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What Gandhi Can Teach Us About Change
Today, we remember Mohandas Gandhi as an icon, but he didn’t start out that way. As a young lawyer, he was so shy he had trouble mustering up the courage to speak in open court. Undisciplined, with a violent temper, it took him years to gain a measure of self control. It would be difficult to look at the young Gandhi and see the man he would grow into.
The truth is that we revere Gandhi today not for some eternal essence, but who he became and that is what we can best learn from. It wasn’t any mysterious, superhuman quality that made him such a legendary figure, but the things he learned along the way and he learned those lessons from the mistakes he made.
He would later write, “Men say that I am a saint losing myself in politics. The fact is I am a politician trying my hardest to be a saint.” He was, in truth, a master strategist, luring opponents into a dilemma that would put them in the impossible position of choosing either surrender or damnation. If you want to pursue change, Gandhi is a model to follow.
The Himalayan Miscalculation
Gandhi’s failures as a young lawyer that led him to take a job in South Africa. It was there he faced a humiliation on a train that began his personal transformation. “I saw that South Africa was no country for a self-respecting Indian,” he remembered, “and my mind became more and more occupied with the question of how this state of things might be improved.”
It was there he would develop his own brand of civil disobedience, which he called Satyagraha or “truth force.” He took pains to distinguish it from passive resistance, which he felt was a “weapon of the weak.” His vision was something more forceful — to expose the faults of a repressive regime through strategic action. It was his success in South Africa that first earned him the title of “Mahatma” or “holy man.”
When he returned to India in 1915, he was an international figure and a leading light in the Indian nationalist movement. A few years after he arrived, incensed by the oppressive Rowlatt Acts that extended emergency measures put in place during World War I, such as indefinite detention without due process, Gandhi called for nationwide strikes.
