Making time for a Child is Paramount

During my recent visit to Gandhi Smriti (Birla House) in Delhi, I had the good fortune to meet with Gandhiji’s grand daughter – Srimati Tara Gandhi Bhattacharjee, she is the daughter of Devadas Gandhi, the Mahatma’s youngest son.

Her recollection of Gandhiji’s interaction when she was just 8, while Sir Stanford Cripps, British statesman, who had arrived in to India for talks on Indian Independence waited exemplifies the fact that Gandhiji believed that time spent interacting with children was paramount, all other things could wait.

A scene in the film Gandhi also demonstrates this quality of the Mahatma, when Pandit Nehru and other Indian leaders wait while Gandhiji heads of to the river bank to assist a young girl in applying a mud pack to a lamb.

MKG @ Shanghai Art Fair 2010

The Shanghai Art Fair a part of the Shanghai International Art Festival will open in China on the 8th of September 2010. A large bronze sculptor of MGK by the famous Australian sculptor Cherina will be exhibited in front of the of the northern gate of ShanghaiMART

Reports say “MKG blesses the Shanghai Art Fair, a beautiful and harmonious "art carnival", and Shanghai Art Fair makes holy salutation to this great figure that changed the world.”

The sculptor is 2.2m high and weighs One ton

Cherina has used the Roden touch in modelling, creating only with his thumb and fingers, no tools. Minimizing the physical elements of expression by putting accent on muscles rather than bones, he has simplified the head-form to the maximum and extorted facial expression thereby giving it life to the Sculptor. The result is a historic work of fine art, sculpture.

Cherina expressed that it was difficult task to come up with unique and original idea of expressing greatness, kindness, philosophy, humanity and great many other virtues that Gandhi had; in one work of art, sculpture, but he hopes that the physical expression of Mahatma Gandhi can be transferred into psychological portrait of the Man.

The website of Cherina

The Nobel Peace prize of 1948

MKG was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize – 5 times - 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and 1948. I am sure a lot of us wonder why he never won. Or maybe he did ….. The article “Mahatma Gandhi, the Missing Laureate” by Øyvind Tønnesson, Peace Editor at Nobel Prize from 1998-2000 provides some insight.



A except from the article

Why Was Gandhi Never Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?
Up to 1960, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded almost exclusively to Europeans and Americans. In retrospect, the horizon of the Norwegian Nobel Committee may seem too narrow. Gandhi was very different from earlier Laureates. He was no real politician or proponent of international law, not primarily a humanitarian relief worker and not an organiser of international peace congresses. He would have belonged to a new breed of Laureates.

There is no hint in the archives that the Norwegian Nobel Committee ever took into consideration the possibility of an adverse British reaction to an award to Gandhi. Thus it seems that the hypothesis that the Committee's omission of Gandhi was due to its members' not wanting to provoke British authorities, may be rejected.

In 1947 the conflict between India and Pakistan and Gandhi's prayer-meeting statement, which made people wonder whether he was about to abandon his consistent pacifism, seem to have been the primary reasons why he was not selected by the committee's majority. Unlike the situation today, there was no tradition for the Norwegian Nobel Committee to try to use the Peace Prize as a stimulus for peaceful settlement of regional conflicts.

During the last months of his life, Gandhi worked hard to end the violence between Hindus and Muslims which followed the partition of India. We know little about the Norwegian Nobel Committee's discussions on Gandhi's candidature in 1948 – other than the above quoted entry of November 18 in Gunnar Jahn's diary – but it seems clear that they seriously considered a posthumous award. When the committee, for formal reasons, ended up not making such an award, they decided to reserve the prize, and then, one year later, not to spend the prize money for 1948 at all. What many thought should have been Mahatma Gandhi's place on the list of Laureates was silently but respectfully left open.

1 December 1999

The full article is available at :

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/articles/gandhi/