Word: satyagraha
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...century marked by brutality, Gandhi perfected a different method of bringing about change, one that would turn out (surprisingly) to have more lasting impact. The words he used to describe it do not translate readily into English: Satyagraha (holding firmly onto the deepest truth and soul-force) and ahimsa (the love that remains when all thoughts of violence are dispelled). They formed the basis for civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance. "Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind," he said. "It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity...
Those credos came together in the two principles that ruled his public life: what he called Satyagraha, the force of truth and love; and the ancient Hindu ideal of ahimsa, or nonviolence to all living things. He first put those principles to political work in South Africa, where he had gone to practice law and tasted raw discrimination. Traveling to Johannesburg in a first-class train compartment, he was ordered to move to the "colored" cars in the rear. When he refused, he was hauled off the train and left to spend a freezing night in the station. The next...
...Tamils spent the 1950s and 1960s protesting peacefully, following the satyagraha method of peace pioneered by Mahatma Gandhi. The police spent the 1950s and 1960s beating them up. During the 1970s, the LTTE formed. In 1983, open fighting began. My parents grew up in a perpetual state of emergency--random police checkpoints, people disappearing, arrests and imprisonment without cause, questioning without reasonable suspicion...
Every week it's something new but never useful. If the section were about Ancient Greece, he might bring up Gandhi's philosophy of satyagraha, but if it's about modern India, Plato is the man of the hour...
Since the premiere in 1980 of Philip Glass's Satyagraha, which depicted the origins of Gandhi's nonviolent pacifism, operas have taken on such subjects as the thawing of the cold war (John Adams' Nixon in China), a horrifying mass murder (John Moran's The Manson Family) and the life and times of a fiery black radical (Anthony Davis' X). Throw in William Bolcom's 1992 McTeague, a setting of Frank Norris' wrenching turn-of-the-century novel, and Steve Reich's The Cave, a challenging examination of the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict that gets its American premiere...