At age 10, Arun Gandhi, grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, became a victim of racism when three white youths beat him up. A few months later, he was beaten up by some black youths. "I was so filled with rage that I wanted eye-for-an-eye justice," he told his General Session audience. "It became such an obsession that I subscribed to Charles Atlas's exercise program so that I could pump iron and beat up people who messed with me." That's when his parents decided to take him from his home in South Africa to live with his grandfather in India.
Photo by Mark Regan
The lessons Arun Gandhi learned from the great spiritual leader profoundly changed his attitudes about violence. The angry boy bent on retaliation grew into an adult who cofounded the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Non- violence, headquartered at Christian Brothers University in Memphis, Tenn.
"One of the first lessons Grandfather taught me was about using anger positively," Gandhi recalled. "He suggested that I should write an anger journal. He said, 'Every time you feel anger, don't pour it out on somebody or something but pour it all out in your journal. But write the journal with the intention of finding a solution to the problem, not just to get that anger out of your system.'" If we don't address the issues that caused the anger, his grandfather told him, then we are going to be faced with those issues over and over again.
A Little Pencil
"I also learned a very important lesson in nonviolence through a little pencil," Gandhi related. Walking home from school, he had tossed a three-inch pencil into the bushes, thinking it was too small to use. But when he asked his grandfather for a new pencil, Mahatma Gandhi asked him to find the old one.
"I said, 'You must be kidding. You don't expect me to look for this little pencil in the dark?'" Gandhi recalled. "He said, 'Oh, yes, I do. Here's a flashlight; this will help you.'"
Hours later, when Arun Gandhi returned with the pencil, his grandfather taught him two important lessons. The first lesson was that even in the making of a simple thing like a pencil, we use a lot of the world's natural resources. When we throw away the world's natural resources, that is violence against nature. Lesson number two was that when affluent societies overconsume the resources of the world, they deprive people elsewhere of resources, forcing them to live in poverty—and that is violence against humanity.
This kind of passive violence is something that we ignore, Gandhi said. "We don't use any physical force, but nevertheless we are violent because we hurt other people. Unless we acknowledge the violence that we practice every day and make a change in that, we'll never be able to bring an end to physical violence in our society."