Word: gandhis
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...unbroken war, feuding and violence that reaches back as far as Alexander the Great [THE WAR, Nov. 19]. You failed to mention the remarkable story of how, in the 1930s and '40s, under the spiritual leadership of Badshah Khan, a Pashtun tribal leader and close ally of Mohandas Gandhi's, 100,000 Pashtun warriors embraced nonviolence, enduring harsh repression at the hands of the British. In a time when Muslims, including ethnic Pashtun, are feared and even despised, the public doesn't know that an Islamic leader took those same people to the pinnacle of their humanity, the nonviolence...
...definitions) the limits of conventional fiction. Half A Life (Knopf; 211 pages), the latest hybrid, begins in colonial India with a droll anecdote. The son of a Brahmin family marries a low-caste woman and forfeits his social standing. He is a maharaja's tax clerk who, influenced by Gandhi's politics of poverty, makes false account entries in favor of poor landowners. Unwelcome at home and in danger of prosecution, the upstart takes cover as a mute beggar. A touring W. Somerset Maugham is impressed by this bogus act of mystical piety and is inspired to write his best...
...This is the world of Ruchir Joshi's The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (Flamingo; 376 pages) a first novel that tells of three generations of an Indian family stretched over a century of political and social turmoil. Mahadev and Suman Pathak, Bhatt's parents, fall in love during Mohandas Gandhi's nonviolent agitations of the 1930s. Paresh Bhatt himself is a world traveler who wanders aimlessly through life, finally following his offspring back to India and settling down in his hometown of Calcutta. It is Joshi's witty fabrication of the future that lifts his work from the rash...
...showing that chimps made and used tools (most famously, adapting sticks to hunt for termites), electrified the academic world. But now, many books and National Geographic specials later, she is more than a famous naturalist. She has become a scientific saint and the recipient of many honors, including the Gandhi-King Award for Nonviolence, just given to her by the Millennium World Peace Summit...
...greatest leaders of the past century, Mahatma Gandhi, had foreseen all of this in the equally murderous relations between communities in India before partition. He knew the awful logic of violence. His view was that the Communists had it all quite wrong. The ends did not justify the means. On the contrary, it was the character of the means used that determined the nature of the ends achieved. Violence will result in further violence. The infernal spiral must be turned back by any means possible. And by holding on to truth, satyagraha...