Book Review: My Experiments with Truth; Mahatma Gandhi

Book Review: My Experiments with Truth

M.K.Gandhi

 

AUTHOR  Mahatma Gandhi

GENRE  Auto-Biography,Self help

YEAR OF PUBLISH 1927

PAGES 455

BOOK REVIEW OF My Experiments with Truth

Who doesn't want to know more about the man who made nationalism a real mass movement in India. The book is a collection of events and circumstances spanning childhood, education, association with persons, and most important of all the father of the nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. His own insights and firm beliefs on the concept of truth and non-violence finally solidified into 'Satyagraha' that guided India's struggle for freedom and forced the British empire to handle the freedom movement markedly different from how they were conventionally doing. 

 Gandhi's methods were intense, sometimes even bordering on paranoia that often isolated his near and dear ones, even including his own family, but the remarkable adherence to the held beliefs in the face of such pressures is what makes the autobiography so captivating, and indeed makes Mahatma of a mere mortal. 

We would have so liked the story to go further up to India's independence, to know his thought process on important historical events like partition and how India as a nation should be, but as is the nature with divine things, we simply can't have enough. It is a must-read and indeed the very foundational work to perhaps understand and maybe unlock the mind of the man who never took a sword to a fight, yet held immense and unimaginable power to achieve the ends for the greatest good of mankind.

 

QUOTES FROM My Experiments with Truth M.K.Gandhi 

1.       Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.

2.       Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even If I didn't have it in the beginning.

3.       Truth has drawn me into the field of politics, and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means

4.       It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel honored by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

5.       Service without humility is selfishness and egotism.

6.       Leo Tolstoy's life has been devoted to replacing the method of violence for removing tyranny or securing reform by the method of non­resistance to evil. He would meet hatred expressed in violence by love expressed in self-­suffering.

7.       It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.

8.       Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if a mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.

9.       I have called her beautiful because it was her moral beauty that at once attracted me. True beauty after all consists of purity of heart.

10.   No matter how explicit the pledge is, people will turn and twist the text to suit their own purpose

11.   Purification being highly infectious, purification of oneself necessarily leads to the purification of one's surroundings.

 

 

 

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