Archive for 'Be Meets Gandhi'
Be Meets Gandhi
Posted on16. Nov, 2009 by admin.
Be the Change You Wish to See in the World…
Missy Crutchfield and Melissa Turner
Founding Editors
Be Magazine | www.bemagazine.org
Arun Gandhi
Two days after the debut of Be Magazine on 11/11/2009 at 1:00:00 a.m.—Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, came to “share the message” at nearby Cleveland State Community College—perfect timing! Be meets Gandhi.
As a boy, Arun Gandhi spent almost two years living with his grandfather. “I’m really grateful to my parents for making that decision,” Arun Gandhi says. “I think in many ways the 18 months I spent with grandfather and the lessons he taught me were so profound they made a tremendous change in my life.”
Gandhi continues his grandfather’s legacy through sharing the message with student groups. “I do not come to student groups telling them I have a message to share with them and they need to hear it,” Gandhi says. “I come to student groups who have heard about what we are doing and they are inspired to service and they invite me to come and share the message with them—this message has inspired many young people to service.”
Following the presentation, we had the opportunity to meet Arun Gandhi and as he signed books for us we shared with him the vision his grandfather inspired for Be Magazine—Inspiring change and connecting one community, one city, one country at a time—to make a difference around the world. Together we are the change!
Arun Gandhi has a warm and gentle spirit—and as we spoke with him, he shared with us his plans to travel with his family to India over the holidays—he takes groups through Global Exchange each year to follow the path of Gandhi and see first-hand the work that is being accomplished in India.
Born in 1934 in Durban, South Africa, Arun Gandhi is the fifth grandson of India’s late spiritual leader Mohandas Karamchand “Mahatma” Gandhi. In 1946, just before India gained independence from Britain, Arun’s parents took him to live with his grandfather for 18 months. At the age of 23, Arun returned to India, worked as a reporter for The Times of India, and cofounded India’s Center for Social Unity, whose mission is to alleviate poverty and caste discrimination. Arun and his wife, Sunanda, came to the United States in 1987 and in 1991 founded the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence in Memphis, Tennessee.
Arun Gandhi wrote an original essay for the Architects of Peace project. In it, he explores concepts of non-violence taught to him by his grandfather. In his Architects of Peace essay, Arun Gandhi claims that the more possessions we have, “the more we have to secure them from those who covet them.”
Explore: The Gandhian Institute in Bombay is a charitable trust dedicated to propagating the writings of M. K. Gandhi. Many of his entire works have been put online, including The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi, first published in 1945, the book through which much of the world became aware of his philosophy of nonviolence.
To learn more visit www.arungandhi.org.
