Another Gandhi brings goodwill to USF

Arun Gandhi fondly remembers his grandfather and continues to promote his humanitarian principles.

By BABITA PERSAUD, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 22, 2002

TAMPA -- He calls Mahatma Gandhi "grandfather."

Arun Gandhi, who lectures today at the University of South Florida, is the fifth grandson of Mohandas Karamchand "Mahatma" Gandhi. When Arun was 12, he lived with his grandfather for 18 months.

It was 1946. Mahatma Gandhi, having already walked miles to the ocean to protest the taxation of salt, having already spun clothes to protest overpriced British goods, was now occupied with India's transfer of power.

Still, "every day he would spend an hour with me and sit and talk with me and tell me stories, look at my lessons," says Arun Gandhi, 68. "He was just being a grandfather."

That helped the young Arun, who grew up angry in apartheid South Africa, fitting in with neither blacks nor whites.

"I was filled with a lot of rage," he says. "I wanted an eye for an eye. That is when grandfather told me that anger is like electricity."

"Electricity can be used intelligently or it can destroy -- ourselves and everything around us," the world leader told the boy. Use your passion for the good of humanity, he said.

Arun has tried.

Being the grandson of a man as important as Mahatma Ghandi has its burdens. Like many of the great man's offspring, Arun has spent much of his life pursuing peace projects.

He has addressed audiences in Croatia, Ireland, Lithuania and Japan. Today at 2 p.m., he speaks in USF's Cooper Hall, Room 103, as part of the University Lecture Series.

"Everybody wants to know what he was like and how was he as a person," Arun says. "He was a very loving person, he was a very loving grandfather. I was constantly amazed at his ability to take himself out of all the important things he was doing and just be a grandfather."

Arun Gandhi was born to the second son of Mahatma Gandhi, who had four sons and 12 grandchildren before being shot and killed in 1948 by a fanatic Hindu.

While in his 20s, Arun Gandhi was a reporter for the Times of India. He also kept up his grandfather's tradition of aiding India's Untouchable caste and founded the Center for Social Unity in India, which works to end caste discrimination. (Gandhi went on long walks throughout India to collect money for the untouchables.)

In 1987, Arun Gandhi came to the United States to study racism. He compared it to color discrimination in South Africa and the caste system in India.

"Many people came and asked me questions about Gandhi and nonviolence, and I found there was a tremendous interest in knowing more about it in the United States," he says.

In 1991, he founded the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence with is wife, Sunanda, to teach about non-violence and "what Gandhi stood for."

The institute, which is in Memphis, Tenn., hosts workshops, seminars and outreach programs in Tennessee and elsewhere.

In one program, Faces in the Crowd, participants are asked to hold masks of real people in front of their own faces and build stories about that person.

"That's when you realize how many stereotypes come out," says Arun Gandhi." Like grandfather said, "All we can do is plant seeds in the minds of people and hope those seeds will eventually germinate."'

If you go

Arun Gandhi speaks today at 2 p.m. in Cooper Hall, Room 103. A pre-show, with cultural performances, begins at 1 p.m.

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