u/Curious_Compound

Why did Gandhi write his autobiography?

Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, began with an interesting question:

Should a person write the story of their own life?

In 1925, Gandhi's close associate Swami Anand and others requested him to write his life story. Gandhi was initially not ready for it. He felt somewhat uncomfortable with the very idea of writing an autobiography. He believed that there was nothing extraordinary in his life that needed to be presented to the world in the form of an autobiography.

Gandhi had actually started writing it a few years earlier, but the work stopped after his arrest in 1922. At the request of Swami Anand in 1925, he resumed writing it.

By that time, Gandhi had become one of the prominent public faces of the Indian independence movement. In 1922, he was sentenced to six years in prison on charges of sedition, and after being released from prison in 1924, he became active in public life again.

**Eventually, he agreed to write his autobiography.

But with one condition.**

He would not make it a story of his achievements or greatness. He titled it “The Story of My Experiments with Truth.”

He viewed his life as a series of experiments in which his thoughts, decisions, habits, and moral struggles were constantly being tested.

That is why the book does not contain only his successes.

Gandhi also wrote about his shyness as a child, his early marriage, his experiments with eating meat and smoking, stealing, and his personal weaknesses.

In other words, he was not presenting his life as a ready-made ideal. He was showing that his thoughts and actions had also gone through experiments, mistakes, self-examination, and change.

The autobiography was originally written in Gujarati and published serially in Navjivan between 1925 and 1929. Its English translation was published in Young India, translated by Gandhi's secretary, Mahadev Desai.

Another interesting fact is that Gandhi's autobiography tells the story of his life only up to around 1920–21. He did not write the events after that in detail because his public life was already in front of people.

But Gandhi's point here is not limited to Gandhi alone.

The question is: Can we look at our own weaknesses with the same honesty with which Gandhi recorded his weaknesses?

Forget public life—can we even accept our own mistakes and weaknesses within our own homes?

Often, when someone points out our shortcomings, instead of looking at our own shortcomings, we become busy proving that the other person is wrong.

Q1. Today is Gandhi Jayanti. Can you look at yourself today and honestly accept your weaknesses with the same sincerity?

Q2. Try this experiment: Write down the things you have been hiding until now in order to maintain a certain image of yourself.

Source: https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Gandhi_Autobiography.pdf

I recently came across this image about Acharya Prashant's book Ego.

The line on it says: "Kaam bigaad de sirf 6 seconds mein." Basically, your ego can mess things up in just 6 seconds.

And honestly, that made me think. We usually think of ego as something obvious. Someone being arrogant. Someone showing off. Someone thinking they're better than everyone else.

But I think ego shows up in much more ordinary situations. Someone says something that hurts you, and immediately you want to reply. Someone ignores you, and suddenly you feel like ignoring them back. Someone disagrees with you, and you start trying to prove that you're right. Someone points out your mistake, and instead of looking at what they said, you start thinking about how to defend yourself.

Nothing major has actually happened. But inside your head, a whole story starts. "How dare they?" "Why should I be the one to apologize?" "They need to understand what they did." And then you react.

Sometimes it takes only a few seconds. Later, when you're calm, you look back and think: "Why did I even do that?" That's the part I find interesting about ego. It doesn't always feel like ego. It often feels like self-respect, justice, or simply doing what is right. And because it feels so reasonable in that moment, we don't stop to question it.

Maybe the real challenge isn't getting rid of the ego. Maybe it's simply noticing that moment when you are about to react and asking: "Am I responding to the situation, or am I just protecting my image of myself?"

I've started finding that question surprisingly useful. Have you ever reacted to something in the moment and regretted it once you had calmed down?

How did people who could not see find a way to read?

Louis Braille was born in France in 1809. He lost his eyesight at the age of four after an accident. Later, he studied at an institution for blind students in Paris.

At that time, students at the institution read books that used large, raised letters. The system worked, but the books were extremely large and heavy.

Reading was slow, and producing these books was difficult. But there was an even bigger problem. The system made it very difficult for blind students to write on their own.

Then a military officer named Charles Barbier introduced a system at the institution that had originally been created for soldiers. It used raised dots so that soldiers could read messages by touch, even in the dark. The system used 12 raised dots.

Louis Braille saw a possibility in it.

He realised that if the 12-dot system could be made simpler, it could become a much more practical way for blind students to read and write.

In 1824, when he was only 15 years old, Louis Braille developed his own system based on six raised dots. The six dots were arranged in two columns. Different combinations of these dots could represent letters, and they could be easily recognised by touch.

Over time, the same six-dot system was expanded to represent not just letters, but also punctuation, numbers and musical notation.

A system originally created as a military code had become the foundation for a new way of reading and writing through touch.

Louis Braille continued developing his system and published his first book about it in 1829. He died in 1852 at the age of 43. Two years after his death, in 1854, his school officially adopted the Braille system.

From there, the system gradually spread to different parts of the world. Today, Braille remains an important means of reading and writing for blind and visually impaired people around the world.

There is something important about human excellence in the story of Louis Braille.

He did not simply accept an existing system because it was already there. He looked at both its usefulness and its limitations. Where others saw a military code, he saw a possibility.

Human excellence is not just about surviving difficult circumstances. Sometimes, it is about understanding the systems that already exist and seeing what else might be possible within them.

Louis Braille could not restore his eyesight, but he did not allow that limitation to become the limit of what was possible for him.

And perhaps that is the most remarkable part of his story.

He did not create a way to read only for himself. He developed a system that went far beyond his own life and eventually became a way for millions of blind and visually impaired people around the world to read and write.

If we encounter a limitation in our own lives that we cannot change, do we simply accept that limitation as our identity, or can we try to find a new possibility within it?

Sources:

Blindness History Basics: The War of the Dots https://www.aph.org/blog/blindness-history-basics-the-war-on-the-dots/

Blindness History Basics: The First Publication of the Braille Code https://www.aph.org/blog/blindness-history-basics-the-first-publication-of-the-braille-code/

Think about your own day.

At home -> you are someone’s son or daughter.

At work -> you are an employee.

With your friends -> you are a friend.

On social media -> perhaps you present yet another version of yourself.

The same person.

Yet different roles in different situations.

Almost four hundred years ago, Shakespeare captured something similar through a metaphor.

In As You Like It, Jaques says:

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.”

The whole world is a stage, and all men and women are merely actors.

But this metaphor is not simply about the different social roles we play. Jaques uses it to look at human life itself as a sequence of different stages and roles.

On a stage, an actor takes on a role.

He might be a king, a beggar, a soldier, or a fool.

The audience sees him through that role.

But the actor knows that the role is not the entirety of who he is.

Shakespeare takes this idea further and uses the stage as a metaphor for the whole of human life.

Jaques describes life as passing through seven stages:

1. Infancy ->

The helpless child, crying and dependent on a nurse.

2. The schoolboy ->

Carrying his schoolbag reluctantly and dragging himself towards school in the morning.

3. The lover ->

Lost in love, writing poems and expressing his feelings for his beloved.

4. The soldier ->

Young, ambitious, full of courage and eager for reputation. He is willing to take risks for his honour.

5. The justice ->

By now, the person has gained experience and social standing. He has his own house, his own opinions, and a recognised place in society.

6. Old age ->

The body gradually weakens. The person loses some of the strength and activity he once had. Jaques describes him as a “pantaloon” — an old man marked by the decline that comes with age.

7. A return to dependence ->

In the last stage, the person loses many of the abilities he once had and returns to a state of dependence, almost like the beginning of life.

So life appears not as one fixed identity, but as a constantly changing sequence of roles and stages.

The child doesn't remain a child.

The student doesn't remain a student.

The lover changes.

The ambitions of youth change.

Positions and reputations change.

The body changes.

And eventually, even the person we have spent years calling “I” changes.

That, to me, is the power of Shakespeare’s stage metaphor.

He presents life as a stage where there is both an entrance and an exit.

One role appears -> it stays for a while -> then another role takes its place.

We often mistake the scene we are currently living for the whole play, while Shakespeare reminds us that it is only one act.

The role you are playing today is not the whole story of your life.

And perhaps this gives us a chance to step back and look at ourselves a little differently.

Have I mistaken my role for who I actually am?

The stage keeps changing. The roles keep changing.

The question is whether we can see the difference between the role and the reality behind it.

Source: William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56966/speech-all-the-worlds-a-stage

Mornings are beautiful in Rishikesh.

Sky over my head tonight.

Shot this with my pixel night vision. And these stars are mesmerizing. 😍

Did you know there’s actually a hidden feature in cars where you can switch your headlights from HIGH BEAM to LOW BEAM? 🤯

Apparently, it works even when the streetlights are already ON! And guess what? You can use it when there’s oncoming traffic too! 😱

Tata, Mahindra, Suzuki, Hyundai... even Mercedes, BMWs and Audis apparently have this feature. 😂

I know this might sound complicated, so I’ll be posting a detailed tutorial on how to use this revolutionary feature in my next post.

Stay tuned. 🫡😂

Tutorial image attached for those who want to start preparing. 😅

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Fun fact: My grandma used to own an HM Ambassador Mark IV 1.5L petrol, bought in 1981. And apparently, this “hidden” feature wasn’t exactly new — her Ambassador already had a high/low beam (dipper) switch. 😄

So, turns out this revolutionary technology has been around since before most of us were even born. 😂

3...2....1...let's jam