Jamie Lindsay (jllindsay)

Gandhi PG

The movie Gandhi is a biography of Mahatma Gandhi, the lawyer who became the famed leader of the Indian revolt against the British through his philosophy of non-violent protest. The movie begins in South Africa a land until recently was gripped by racial divide. Gandhi arrives and is compelled to fight against racial injustice. He starts a campaign of non-violent resistance against laws that deprive individuals of dignity. For his act of civil defiance he is beaten and imprisoned along with hundreds of others. The end result is the government repealed the laws giving Gandhi his first victory and making him a hero too many. He returned to India to find his people in bondage to the British. In the presence of injustice Gandhi begins his crusade to free the people of India from imperial rule. On this most difficult path many people were beaten and lost their lives, but Mahatma Gandhi theory held true. ?Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence? Mahatma Gandhi. I saw this movie back in the 80s when I was a child, but now I am a man and I watch it with more understanding. With this new perspective I witnessed the manifold character of man. On one side man can be kind and compassionate, and on the other side man can be judgmental and cruel. Mohandas Gandhi is an excellent example of the best of human nature. He toke his idea of Satyagraha and embodied it. The essence of Satyagraha is that it seeks to eliminate antagonisms without harming the antagonists themselves. One should meet force with compassion and aggression with passive resistance in hope of ending injustice. Jesus Christ in his famous sermon on the mount said ?That you resist not evil but whosoever shall smite you on the right cheek turn to him the other also? Matt 5:39. The act of accepting blows without retaliation will cause the antagonist to move from a position of hatred to respect. The movie showed Gandhi?s Satyagraha in action and proved that in the face of maltreatment peaceful resistance is more powerful. This mindset would be useful on the world religion stage. A message of nonviolence and religious tolerance like the bumper sticker that simply reads COEXIST. Individual should have the freedom to abide in one?s own religious truth without government rule and discrimination. To denude a person of this right is to seize from them the most basic of human rights, the right to chose.