Ashram, past Gandhi’s house and the Ashram bookstore, and across the street where a breakfast of idlis and upmas was being served.
After breakfast, we found our way into an administration building where we would hold our workshop. The floor was set out with mats and there was a balcony crowded with students and guests there to observe the proceedings. Sam plopped himself on the floor near the center of the room. Dinesh and I installed ourselves on either side of him. The space was small, crowded with several dozen participants.
Right across from me was our host, Kartikeya Sarabhai, a noted environmentalist and the son of the creator of India’s space program. Kartikeya-ji, one of the Ashram’s trustees, was our host for the day. As I looked around the floor, I saw an intimidating array of distinguished Gandhi scholars, activists, and historians.
Across the floor, dressed in traditional homespun white khadi was Amrut Modi, who has lived at the Ashram since 1955 and used to accompany Vinod Bhava on his walks throughout India. Next to him was the famed Ela Bhatt, who founded the Self-Employed Women’s Association of India in 1972 and joined Desmond Tutu and others as a member of the Elders.
Sitting next to Ela-ji was Dina Patel, whose father spent 40 years helping to compile the 100-volume, 56,000 page Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. For the last seven years, Dina had labored to create an electronic version of the Collected Works, painstakingly and precisely fixing all errors in the optical character recognition (OCR) and the original volumes, creating a sterling edition of the Mahatma’s words.
Dina is one of the world’s leading experts on Gandhi, having labored over all his writings for so long, literally reading every word of the Collected Works. I had met her in Delhi a few days earlier, and she had amazed me with story after story of his life and suggestions for books to read that I had not yet come across. Dina is a walking encyclopedia of Gandhi and she tells her stories with passion and charm.
A smaller group had met the day before at the Ashram to kick off the conversation while Sam and I were still down in Rajasthan, where Sam had presided over the convocation ceremonies at the Central University of Rajasthan where he is the chancellor. Karikeya-ji began the morning by summarizing the previous days discussion on violence in our world.
19
