It depends on an appeal to someones capable of caring | Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My...

Quite interesting to the non-expert | Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth | Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi, Mahadev H. Desai

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	• Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi, Mahadev H. Desai Beacon Press, 1993 - 560 pages average customer review:based on 76 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Phenomenal!

This is one of my favorite books, a powerful and gripping autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi. It changed how I viewed Gandhi. Before reading this book, I only knew him from his famous quotes and some knowledge of Indian history, but now I understand his life a lot more and what made him so great and yet flawed like any human being.

It depends on an appeal to someones capable of caring

I read today is his birthday.
So I hear that old tune in my head, " today it's your birthday..." and think about ultimately the lessons I took from this book. Since I store knowledge I think a bit differently than many- I also store books that way. For one thing they give me impressions, and they hit emotional centers, they call me to actions, they serve as organizers for understanding experiences, or as ways of explaining experience. They function as verbs, occasionally nouns. For a lot of people I believe they are adjectives or maybe sometimes adverbs.
Gandhi wrote this book about his life and reasons. I read it three times and at three different stages, not recently, but soon I'll undertake it again as I am in another stage almost transformed. It struck me on many levels, the book was helpful in processing my experiences teaching, and living, and ultimately assisted me in that part of a me that has to be here alive "doing something about it."

So it's his birthday. And injustices live on. Racial unfairness and "institutionalized" forms live on. Look at the poor here to understand that. What he tells you primarily on one level in the book is that the way he interpreted doing something to change this was to always act on the notion that you stand up to the power with the fairness and rightness of your claim, And with an ability to look at self too. So on one level reading that as it looked in his context, and as it looked in his complete mindset, that has value. I've come quite able to see that you are appealing to your oppressor to face their own darkness or capability, or actions, as if you. I've just got this simple format to say that reading how he came to his actions, how his education functioned within what happened to him, his life, his initial issues with the limits and unfairnesses he saw in an oppressor/oppressee dynamiic are powerful things to read, and his responses- that's a narrative here that allows you to process his actions in a context,see reasons, see ultimate ethical perspectives. It's a massively helpful part because he seeks to make it so possible for any humble, bumbling person that has been given the clarity of an insight, and an abhorance for toleration of further wrong to act.

So it helped build in me an internal barometer already in place. Then there are other layers in his story. Interesting ones. For one thing I always like to listen to how he talks about his relationship to his wife. How he describes ultimately finding the relating one where his aggression functioned, ultimately if biologically driven how that really was for her, for him. He calls the marital act one always routed in aggression. I think that's correct. So he's actually redifining for you "act of love" in case your wires crossed. I think so anyway. I think he's showing you it's amazingly complex. How at root he freed her from the physicality-you have to sit with that it's rather personal- to relating for himself instead through I believe the importance of the relationship, his weaknesses and his responsibility in trying to reveal this I think is a man showing you that he will analyze even something he may never fully get. I may read it differently now. I thought he never got it. Then but I was reading within a very difficult and different perspective and time in my life when kids were small and I felt abandoned often to their daily life over the right to act on outside world things and torn by too many real needs in both. So, right, but he has the capacity to understand that his drives can be looked at for how they hurt another. That he "gets."
And he explains, certainly not to just "testify," though it is that. It's a model of how a person works on their effect on another. Love would call us to that.

So within the book one part that I mull about is his relating the family dimension. I read some criticism of him in that somewhere else-but I think at the least he is speaking of a cost paid to family through his work, or his attempt to understand this from their shoes. He addresses for instance how he educated, or failed to, or the resentments of his son or his family.
He is showing he is willing to address these resentments and that in my world is a rare bird. I think if you read here you will learn something of value even if ultimately you also have to face a man telling you he's a normal man. Just as we all one day face that fact about everyone we maybe idealized.

Another thing I found interesting was how he talked of experiment, when he discusses his relationship to food, it's taken me a long while on that. It's sufficent to say how he relates to milk, stomach pain, valuing animals, life, doing as little damage by or through killing, living values to full extent-it hits you on the most basic levels. We eat daily to sustain life. He looks at what that means, what's going on. What is the process. How he relates to food. You do this everyday, eating, and at least for me this related to levels where you collect some sense of maybe violating a principle like "not killing." It's worth the time to read to see how doing it yourself proceeds his actions, as one of the greatest tools in his box.
So Gandhi made me think about this.
I would grow impatient reading about the food actually-or think it juvenile or have some thread of sarcasm- and that would require I look at why I was dismissive. Ultimately that attitude or that kind of behavior usually means I'm unwilling to do something. Overall I read during times of illness realizing that on that level, in this life, I made fatal errors in seeing and acting, behaving.

Then I recall enjoying and learning from the book about how he brought to consciousness so much, and then informed actions via working from great human models of behavior-those that improved human relating through an active lexicon of love.

So maybe I can see why working one to one daily with kids on reading for instance is such a pleasurable thing. It's such a love driven process. I can then relate to the bigger messages he's speaking.
It's rather hard for me after engaging actively such a text and person-since I cannot do so "in person" or through shared experience, it's hard not to hear this as a walk into his thoughts and his meanings. As a process of "becoming." And that is how the book worked for me as a change agent.

A model for me, or a "way," with the willingness to confront error, mistake, drives, biologies, stupidities, evolved into streaming a life/consciousness through an experimental process that's driven by that core value system to strive with love based acting for a better world.

I think this is a book, I'm saying, one "takes up."
And so it's your birthday, may you live on in those that take you up to continue that work and move out of self to selflessness to functioning for the good of humanity. And thus cause each of us growth and to find the capacity to love.

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Quite interesting to the non-expert

Gandhi's autobiography, written in his fifties with great accomplishments yet to come, cannot be read without companion study. He explicitly says significant content was skipped, and one can easily sense that when reading, even without much knowledge of the events. The book is mostly very interesting in its reflections on Gandhi's youth and the years in South Africa where many of his ideas formed and were first tried in practice.

The 1910s and 1920s years in India are less engaging, with more political content and more details oriented toward what was a current, familiar audience. The target audience at the time also knew much more about what was going on, the various places, the concepts, and the people involved. Here is where I would have preferred more background, which instead must be provided for the non-expert by other sources.

Initially I was surprised by the amount of space devoted to diet and other forms of self-denial, such as "lustful" sexual relations. Eventually that made sense as anchors for how Gandhi thought and adhered to moral principles (and tried to define them), not just in sweeping national issues, but highly personal matters. To him, only if you were personally pure, or nearly pure, could you deserve God's full love and support in higher missions.

Gandhi humbly describes his successes and shows no mercy in pointing out his slips. Occasionally he defends himself against enemies or ones who simply disagreed, and it was refreshing, without the whining and partisan attacks of modern politicians. In many cases, Gandhi was quite gracious to his opponents. However, that was not true when calling out racism and other morally objectionable actions that he and others sought to remove, often successfully. Those stories are the highlight of the book.

Gandhi cannot be considered a great writer, assuming the translation is faithful to his style and vocabulary. No singing Lincoln-esque prose here. Pretty straightforward language accessible to average readers, as when he compares religions or ponders racism while Indians practiced the caste system.

The indirect descriptions of the culture in England, South Africa and India were sharp reminders of how much has changed in a hundred years. I could only imagine the smell and filth in scenes of Gandhi's travels and local poverty.

Certainly anyone interested in Gandhi must read the autobiography and not rely on traditional biographies and historical studies.

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Experiment with yourself

I first read this book in its Tamil translation back in my school days for a local competition. I must have been 11-12 years old at that time and had a profound effect on me.
This is one of the books that you go back to again and again just trying to make sure that such honesty and truthfulness is possible in life.
More than anything else, this book taught me the importance of being true to oneself and to see my actions clearly without strings and criticize and correct. This has not brought me a lot of good but then it has kept me sane in these crazy days.
The book itself is not very big and covers about the first 40 years of Gandhi's life. But this basically is the formation period where the man experiments with his tools for the imperialistic fight and wields them wisely to go on to become Mahatma and Father of this nation.
If you want to read a book which is brutally honest to its subject, look no further.

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Translated by Mahadev Desai and with a New Preface
The only authorized American edition
Mohandas K. Gandhi is one of the most inspiring figures of our time. In his classic autobiography he recounts the story of his life and how he developed his concept of active nonviolent resistance, which propelled the Indian struggle for independence and countless other nonviolent struggles of the twentieth century.

In a new foreword, noted peace expert and teacher Sissela Bok urges us to adopt Gandhi's "attitude of experimenting, of tesing what will and will not bear close scrutiny, what can and cannot be adapted to new circumstances," in order to bring about change in our own lives and communities. All royalties earned on this book are paid to the Navajivan Trust, founded by Gandhi, for use in carrying on his work.

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