Gandhiji – the Maha-Atma

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Gandhiji – the Maha-atma It is said that God reveals Himself in history through different avatars as per the need of the times. Thus centuries ago He came down to the earth in the form of Siddharta, the Buddha, to teach non-violence to mankind. In another era when the world was in the clutches of superstition and dictatorship, Socrates was sent to the earth to teach men how to think and how to reason. Later, about 2000 years ago when man was treated unjustly by his fellowman, when hatred and egotism and injustice were rampant, Jesus Christ came into the world, calling God his Father, and taught men the power of love, bringing about an equivalence between God and love and declaring: God is love. In our own contemporary age, an age of cunningness, deceit and knavery, the Heavenly Being Himself descended upon the earth in the avatar of, I dare say, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. To preach the gospel of truth and non-violence. He is known as the Mahatma – a man endowed with a Maha-atma – a large or great soul. What made his soul magnificent is his principle of truth and non-violence. He did not become a mahatma overnight. He had in himself all the faults and foibles of a mortal. Only that he outgrew them with age. People were often irritated with him for changing his views time and again. When queried, Gandhi would reply with his characteristic mischievous smile that he had learnt better now. However, he was just an ordinary man of flesh and blood who was “killed by his own people for whose redemption he lived”, to quote the editorial that appeared in the Hindustan Standard on the next day of Gandhi’s assassination, just as Socrates and Jesus Christ had been killed by their own men, by people who could not, rather, did not want to understand them. One was poisoned and the other, crucified. Terming Gandhi’s assassination a “second crucifixion in the history of the
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