The October Heroes of India

Gandhi, Patel and Kalam - the Trio who gave wings to the Nation

- JOE ERUPPAKKATT

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

On 2 October, we remember Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of our Nation. We honour and pay our respects to him for giving India a reason to fly high in freedom. He fought for our freedom with the novel weapons of non-violent protests and adherence to truth and ahimsa. His strength lay in the fact that he was the message; he walked the talk, he preached what he practised, and lived what he taught. The mighty British imperial powers shuddered at his presence, not because he owned any mass weapon of destruction, but because he wielded enormous moral power in his personality.

They called him the ‘half-naked fakir’ for his refusal to wear a shirt even when he travelled to London for the Round Table Conference with the British authorities. Winston Churchill, the then Prime Minister of Britain, couldn’t be more defamatory and offensive when he said, “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well-known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice-regal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.” Gandhi, of course, regarded the expression as a compliment rather than an insult. He said he would not wear a shirt and would walk around wearing only a