What does Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi made Mahatma Gandhi?
The sun rose one morning. It seemed like another day. Everyone around the world were going through their daily morning routines, following their rehearsed rituals in life, everything just seemed like another day.
So a man bought a ticket, to go from Durban to Johannesburg, and because he can afford it, he was a very successful lawyer, he boarded the first class compartment, which had only two white people in it and they could not accept a brown man in it. So they asked MK Gandhi to leave, and this lawyer told them that,
I bought the ticket. So I’m allowed to travel in it. If you felt I should not travelled, you shouldn’t have given me the ticket. Now I paid for it, I’m not sitting in the second class. I’ll only travel in this.
So when the Pietermaritzburg station came, they arranged for the white police to come and throw him out of the compartment. So MK Gandhi was thrown out of it.
Sometimes we don’t feel physically threatened, we feel psychologically threatened and this man, at that moment went through that psychological fear of how he was treated. That was a very humiliating experience. In his own words, MK Gandhi says,
It was so cold. I was trembling. I had to ask them, who had thrown me out, to also throw my jacket out. And I was so scared to ask them because I didn’t know how I would be treated.
MK Gandhi was not talking about the physical thing. This dignity, respect and he didn’t know how he would be treated. All he want to ask was, You’ve thrown me out now throw my jacket out, it was so cold for me in the platform, I was trembling and I didn’t know how to ask.
They locked him in the station itself. And he is still Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, nothing has happened. Everything in the world is going exactly the same, there is no change at all.
It is so easy to chronicle all these physical events, but something was happening in his mind in that moment. He was devastated, disrespected, hurt in his dignity.
We’re only writing all the time what happens outside him, they threw him and then he fell down, this was the station and you also want to remember a story by all these things. I’m not interested in all these thing. I’m only interested in one thing. What must be happening in the mind of that man in that moment? And he was having a thought,
If this is what I’m feeling like an individual, what should an entire nation must be going through to be ruled by the Britisher? A nation of indignity.
Nothing has changed. Still, he is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
I think I should do something about it, one thought comes to him. Breakthrough happens.
That one thought made Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi transformed into Mahatma Gandhi. The rest is history.
