It was the early 1970s. I was just a kid then. I was trying to learn the basic letters. Our tutor Shri Suresh Babu was struggling with me to make me learn the first alphabet but my faculty was stubbornly resistant to accept that. Anyway, at that time I knew about Gandhiji. The Mahatma at that time, I felt, lived around, not as a person but as an influence. His presence as an ennobling ethos permeated the ambience in that remote location of the country. I saw his pictures hung on the walls of public offices and places as if looking at me and everyone affectionately with a mischievous smile. As I grew, I see today, his presence gradually withering away over time. We can discuss the legacies of the Mahatma endlessly in appreciation or approbation but the fact, which I feel we cannot deny is that he bound us in a very humanising association as a nation. At that time, which I can articulate now, the Indians then must have felt that they belonged to the nation, and the nation belonged to them, and everything was geared to the idea of universal good. And Bapu with his careless smile symbolised the spirit.
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