Gandhi’s Passion, by Stanley Wolpert
In a cynical and materialistic age, Gandhi will always be seen as hopelessly out of touch: a holy man who is wholly wrong, a man who lacked understanding of the way things work and the way things have to be.
Yet Gandhi's life was a strike against such bone-dry fatalism, and it's the cynics of his time who were proven to be unrealistic. Gandhi liberated India from Britain's heavy and oppressive rule, and he did so by sheer moral force, the force of truth, or "satyagraha."
This book's thesis is that "by re-creating himself, through the power of his passion, in the humble, vulnerable image of India's poorest starving naked millions, Gandhi would . . . call upon that unarmed ragged army, whose pain he mirrored and magnified in his own naked body, to follow him barefoot up India's Via Dolorosa to freedom." Through this demanding transformation, he became India Walking.
