This blog post is correlated to my other blog post called Gandhi and Me. You can’t read this one without reading the other one. They both are complementary, they both complete each other.
Well, you all know that it was Tagore who gave Gandhi the tag of Mahatma but no one knows why. I was the fortunate one to find this answer after meeting with a lot of living followers of Gandhi.
It started when Gandhi came back from South Africa. After the return, he immediately met his mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale who suggested keeping mum and travel length and breadth of the country to understand the culture and difficulties of the common people. India was mostly in the villages at that time and Gandhi spent almost two years doing walking pilgrimages to different parts of India dressed like the common people.
Tagore gave him this tag because —
- He was the only man from this time who had the capacity and attitude to stand in front of a small home, in a remote poor village and look like one of them.
- Although Gandhi has so much wisdom in him, he always attributed it to the ancient wisdom and Indian tradition.
- He decided to give up a fancy life and take up a minimalist lifestyle that a common family, in a remote poor village, would have.
Although there may be more or less this is what I’ve gathered by doing a lot of research on Gandhi.