FIFTY THIRD DAY REPORT GANDHI SWARAJ PADYATRA by Jeff Knaebel
FIFTY THIRD DAY REPORT
GANDHI SWARAJ PADYATRA
by Jeff Knaebel, homeless and stateless sojourner free
10 October 2009
Gandhi Quotations From Samyojana 2008
(Society For Integrated Development of Himalaya, Mussoorie)
The Government’s power is maintained not because of its machine guns, but because of our deluded love for it. This delusion has three forms: love for the council, which is comparable to Sita’s infatuation for the illusory deer – love for the courts, and love for education. We are in the grip of these infatuations.
To my mind it is a sin to enter councils and attend courts, and an altogether horrible sin to attend schools. Unless I teach you the ABC of how to shake off your slavery, everything else will be unavailing. First, see that you are clean. If you do not learn law or medicine, India will not sink into a bottomless pit – but with slavery, it will. It will not then be a country of human beings, but of beasts.
Not to speak out one’s mind out of fear of anyone – even of a great Empire – this is to be a slave. (Speech to students & teachers, Surat 6/10/1920).
The message of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Peace, has been little understood in Europe. Light upon it may have to be thrown from the East. Politics divorced from religion is as a corpse only fit to be buried. (Speech at Missionary Conference, Madras, 14/2/1916).
When you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, and then apply this test. Recall the face of the poorest and weakest person whom you have seen, and ask yourself if the action you are contemplating is going to be of any use to him or her.
Will they gain anything from it? Will it restore them to control over their own life & destiny? Will it lead to Swaraj (freedom) for the hungry & starving millions? (One of Gandhiji’s last notes left behind in 1948, expressing his deepest social thought).
***
Today we got underway from Gumma at 0810 hrs. Even at that late time of departure the sun had still not reached our location.
Our destination was Kotkhai, up a fairly stiff grade to elevation 1,760 meters.
Here at Kotkhai a stand of spruce trees looks just like the blue spruce of Alaska. Only there are no lizards in Alaskan spruce forests. The amazing and wonderful bio-diversity of the gift of Bharat Mata to mankind.
The schools are conducting examinations, so our presentation program was limited to giving multiple copies of Hind Swaraj to the public library.
My mind returns to the once-pristine island of Tobago in the Caribbean, where I had gone with my parents as a small child. There were no automobiles. We stayed in a quaint British colonial guest house. Us children swam in clear turquoise waters and romped in our birthday suits on pristine untrammeled beaches.
Now it is all gone to commercialized tourism and high rise hotels and the ugly built environment of man has displaced the wondrous beauty of nature.
Both by the character of its construction and the nature of its other guests, our accommodation at Kotkhai is reminiscent of Alaska pipeline construction camps.
I remember my mental conditioning as a child of the industrial West. Father was a mining engineer whose work was to bulldoze roads through wild jungles and to drill-blast-smash-down-mountains in civilization’s mad lust for copper, gold, and uranium. He was very successful and became very wealthy in the violence of this destruction.
And I was trained to follow. Blind obedience to destructive authority is insanity.
Today we walked 10 km – tally 899.
— END OF DAY 53 REPORT —
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