Jul. 5th, 2017 10:05 pm
My last book post.
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oakfarmI wrote I would post something about a Gandhi biography. Here it is. The last year in high school I wrote a 4000 word long paper about Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known as Mahatma Gandhi. Since that I haven’t read a word about him until this summer when I found a biography over him.
The writer is called Zac O’Yeah, or he calls himself that. He’s from Finland, grew up in Sweden and lives in India. But about Gandhi. I wrote very positive about him. Perhaps we could call my paper a a hagiography. Having Gandhi as a hero serves a function. In such a violent and barbaric time as the 20 century he liberated India by following the Sermon of the Mountain. The English suppress us with violence! Let them hit the other cheek too. Let them hit you in front of the world media so everyone can see they have lost the moral superiority, they claim to have. If one on the other hand thinks religion poisons everything, then the deeply religious Gandhi can’t be a hero (for the record I haven’t read that book).
No matter how it’s with that, my high school paper made Gandhi a hero. So did Richard Attenboroughs three hour long movie Gandhi (1982). This biography is positive about him, but doesn’t make him a hero. For one thing O’Yeah wrote about the bizarre aspects of Gandhi too. You may or may not know that Gandhi, when being over 70 years old, slept next to naked young girls to test his celibacy. For the record, according to both the biography and wikipedia the girls in question said it wasn’t anything sexuall about it.
It gets stranger, Gandhi was open with all this, and since he thought spiritual life and politics was connected, testing his celibacy was for him a way of ending the bloody conflict between hindus and muslims in India. At least that was the biography say. That’s having high thoughts about yourself. Thinking what you do in bed could influences angry mobs killing each other. Okay, to write some drivel and make a parable, it’s like if JFK thought it was important for world peace that he had sex with Marilyn Monroe.
PS. Of course, I can’t ensure it wasn’t anything sexuall about Gandhi and the girls. We all know it wouldn’t be the first time a woman thought: “no one will ever believe me”, or be ashamed or something else.
The writer is called Zac O’Yeah, or he calls himself that. He’s from Finland, grew up in Sweden and lives in India. But about Gandhi. I wrote very positive about him. Perhaps we could call my paper a a hagiography. Having Gandhi as a hero serves a function. In such a violent and barbaric time as the 20 century he liberated India by following the Sermon of the Mountain. The English suppress us with violence! Let them hit the other cheek too. Let them hit you in front of the world media so everyone can see they have lost the moral superiority, they claim to have. If one on the other hand thinks religion poisons everything, then the deeply religious Gandhi can’t be a hero (for the record I haven’t read that book).
No matter how it’s with that, my high school paper made Gandhi a hero. So did Richard Attenboroughs three hour long movie Gandhi (1982). This biography is positive about him, but doesn’t make him a hero. For one thing O’Yeah wrote about the bizarre aspects of Gandhi too. You may or may not know that Gandhi, when being over 70 years old, slept next to naked young girls to test his celibacy. For the record, according to both the biography and wikipedia the girls in question said it wasn’t anything sexuall about it.
It gets stranger, Gandhi was open with all this, and since he thought spiritual life and politics was connected, testing his celibacy was for him a way of ending the bloody conflict between hindus and muslims in India. At least that was the biography say. That’s having high thoughts about yourself. Thinking what you do in bed could influences angry mobs killing each other. Okay, to write some drivel and make a parable, it’s like if JFK thought it was important for world peace that he had sex with Marilyn Monroe.
PS. Of course, I can’t ensure it wasn’t anything sexuall about Gandhi and the girls. We all know it wouldn’t be the first time a woman thought: “no one will ever believe me”, or be ashamed or something else.
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I know very little about Gandhi as a person and this book might be interesting. Is the author of Indian ancestry even though he was born in Finland?
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I didn’t remember the name Matthew Shepard, but I remember the crime.
Interesting sometimes people do the opposite, build up the legend of heroes. I don’t know if you know about Raoul Wallenberg? A Swedish diplomat who together with other diplomats saved Jews in Budapest, 1944. I have read that there’s stories going around about Raoul that’s not true. Like that he himself should have bordered trains on their way to Auschwitz and dragged people from the guards. No one is not saying he didn’t saved Jews, it’s just that for some reason people have had the need to spice up or make up stories about him.