Gandhi... valores para una propuesta de futuro

The Mahatma Overseas Dra. Nalini Natarajan, autora de Atlantic Gandhi It was an honor for me to be able to write on Mahatma Gandhi, a figure about whom Albert Einstein famously said: “Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.” We all know Gandhi as a national leader, one whose non-violent struggle liberated the people of India from colonialism and set an example for the rest of the colonized world. But there is a side of Gandhi that is less spoken of, which makes him particularly relevant to us today. This is Gandhi as a global figure who learnt to connect worlds, to apply the lessons he learned in one part of the world to another. This is a skill we badly need today. This global Gandhi is also, significantly for us in the Caribbean, closely linked to the ferment of revolutionary ideas around the Atlantic rim, ideas which challenged the exploitative plantation system of slavery and its successor, indenture. His evolution of nationalist doctrine out of the misery and abuse of plantation life in South Africa relates him to Atlantic struggles. Gandhi reaches Durban as a young man of 24, an overseas traveler, who steps into the globalizing world of 1893. Recognizing fellow subcontinentals on a distant shore, he is unaware of the racial cauldron of South Africa he has just stepped into. Here are Gandhi’s words.