Relevance of
Gandhi - A View From New York
By E S Reddy
…The civil rights movement led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther
King in the 1950s, as well as much of the resistance to the Vietnam war, were
inspired by Gandhi. Many hundreds of volunteers went through training in
nonviolence. The success of these movements demonstrated that active
nonviolence was not for Indians alone but can be practised by people of all
religions and racial origins in America. There was an explosion of interest in
Gandhi among activists, academics and other scholars. Numerous books and
articles are being published here since then, and they include some of the best
studies on Gandhi. They have dealt not merely with the philosophy of satyagraha
or the methods of nonviolence resistance but with the wide range of experiments
of Gandhi. More and more people began to study Gandhi, visit his ashrams in
India and practise aspects of his teachings.
It would be wrong, however, to exaggerate the influence of
Gandhi in America. If we look for “Gandhians”, there are but a few. But
hundreds of thousands of Americans have derived inspiration from the life and
thought of Gandhi while attached to their own faiths and traditions. That is as
it should be. READ MORE…
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