Some interesting facts about Gandhiji
He was not born a courageous, outspoken leader. In fact, in his autobiography, he says that, as a boy, he was so shy that he would run home from school because he could not bear to talk to anybody.
He was a walking enthusiast. Walking, he said, “is justly called the prince of exercises". He began enjoying long walks in high school, preferring lengthy rambles to organized sports. As a law student in London, he saved money by walking as many as eight to ten miles a day. It was primarily those long walks, he said, that “kept me practically free from illness throughout my stay in England and gave me a fairly strong body". All those years of walking served him well during the Salt March of 1930 when, at the age of 60, he walked 241 miles from his ashram to the sea at Dandi.
Once during a train journey a British asked Gandhi to get out of the train as he was considered as a ‘black’. But Gandhi refused as he had the ticket with him. The British and the Railway officer cruelly pushed Gandhi out of the train. This is a sample of Gandhi’s bitter experiences with British.
While in England in 1931, Gandhi made his first radio broadcast for the United States. The first thing the people of the United States heard the Mahatma say was, “Do I have to speak into this thing?”
Gandhi was basically very helping and concerned about others. Once while he was boarding train one of his shoes slipped and fell on to the track. He instantly removed the other shoe and threw it near the first one. His intention was to help the person who would find the pair and help himself.
His life aims were truth, non-violence, spiritualism, religiousness, honesty, discipline, loyalty, aspiration and so on. All these excellent high qualities made him the Mahatma which means a great soul.
Gandhi was extremely punctual. One of his very few possessions was a dollar watch. Just before he was assassinated, on January 30, 1948, Gandhi was upset because he was ten minutes late getting to a regular prayer meeting.
Time Magazine, the famous U.S. publication, named Mahatma Gandhi the Man of the Year in 1930.
He was a lawyer, but what a lawyer! He said, “I realized the true function of a lawyer was to unite parties riven asunder.” Thus, he spent his twenty years in practice “bringing about private compromises of hundreds of cases. I lost nothing thereby—not even money, certainly not my soul.”