It's always a wonderful feeling to celebrate your nation’s birthday. Its not that I'm a nationalist, I tend to be anything but. However, what warms me to my country's freedom is only the fact that peace and non-violence triumphed over aggression.
Gandhi, who formed the Indian consciousness, built his message on the edifice of "non-violence" and "non-violent resistance", which at times brought the mighty British Empire to its knees. As I have been researching for my organisations' website, I have going through tons of video footage showing peaceful civic disobedience. It's hard to hurt someone when he is armed with nothing but his body and mind. This victory is helpful to idealists like me; it's nice to know that fairytales come alive...sometimes.
It's funny how history picks the most bizarre personalities to alter its courses. For Christianity, it was the odd carpenter and his band of twelve fishermen who protested religious fanaticism. For Islam, it was the uneducated and illiterate Mohammed, who altered the thinking of an otherwise brutal society. More recently, in Bosnia it was a musician (Vedran Smailovic) who bore sniper attacks to play his cello in the streets of Sarajevo. And in India's case, it was a frail old man who "could have been physically crushed by anyone" - said his friend and fellow freedom fighter, Ms. Sarojini Naidu.
For those of us who look around us with the intention of bringing about social change, it's important to remember that the true change comes from the heart and the pen, and not from the barrel of a gun. In peace,
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