Having been interested in Gandhi and India since my twenties and having read a good deal about him, I was eager to read Becoming Gandhi. The author and I are roughly the same age, being in our twenties during the 1970s and seem to have similar thoughts regarding the Viet Nam war and American life in general at that time and to have significant concerns about the viability of the human race at a time when our society seems to be moving more toward violence and lack of common decency.
The book is listed under “Gandhi,” “Religious Leader Biographies” and “Personal Transformation Self-Help” by Amazon, and I found the book to be a hodge-dodge of these classifications as well as a bit of a memoir. He winnows Gandhi’s teaching down to six points and tries to implement them in his own life. These are:
- Truth
- Nonviolence
- Vegetarianism
- Simplicity of Life
- Faith
- Celibacy
Journalist Perry Garfinkel spends three years traveling the world examining how well Gandhi’s ideals have held up in the present. He traces the path of Gandhi through India, England, and South Africa and talks about his accomplishments and even his flaws. He discusses his life and death by assassination on January 30, 1948, shortly after Indian gained independence from Britain. Garfinkel discusses at length the Indian words for the six points above and their meaning, so to a certain extent, this is Indian Philosophy for Dummies. There is some discussion of what Garfinkel tries to do with these precepts in his own life, but not enough to actually guide others and lacking the ups and downs and ah, ha! moments one expects from what could have been a fascinating memoir. I was left with rather ambivalent feelings about the book, it being more and less than I expected.
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Becoming Gandhi: My Experiment Living the Mahatma’s 6 Moral Truths in Immoral Times (Sounds True, January 30, 2024) is available through:
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