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"My Life is My Message."
-Mahatma Gandhi

thks for chance

3 days ago
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Thanks for the giveaway!

3 days ago
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Gandhi's life.

Gandhi was born a son of a chief minister of one of the states of India and went to London to study law and become a lawyer. He wasn't very good because he was too shy, and then ended up taking a legal job in South Africa (part of the British Empire at the time) and lived there for over two decades, from 1893 to 1914, working as a lawyer and fighting for the rights of Indians—and only Indians. To him, as he expressed quite plainly, black South Africans were barely human. He referred to them using the derogatory South African slur kaffir. He lamented that Indians were considered “little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa.” In 1903, he declared that the “white race in South Africa should be the predominating race.” After getting thrown in jail in 1908, he scoffed at the fact that Indians were classed with black, not white, prisoners.

During his years in South Africa, he once responded to a young man’s sexual harassment of two of Gandhi’s female followers by forcibly cutting the girls’ hair short to make sure they didn’t invite any sexual attention. (Michael Connellan, writing in the Guardian, carefully explained that Gandhi felt women surrendered their humanity the minute men raped them.) He operated under the assumption that men couldn’t control their basic predatory impulses while simultaneously asserting that women were responsible for—and completely at the mercy of—these impulses. His views on female sexuality were similarly deplorable; according to Rita Banerji, writing in Sex and Power, Gandhi viewed menstruation as the “manifestation of the distortion of a woman’s soul by her sexuality.” He also believed the use of contraceptives was the sign of whoredom.

He confronted this inability to control male libido head-on when he vowed celibacy (without discussing it with his wife) back in India, and using women—including some underage girls, like his grand-niece—to test his sexual patience. He’d sleep naked next to them in bed without touching them, making sure he didn’t get aroused; these women were props to coax him into celibacy.

Kasturba, Gandhi’s wife, was perhaps his most frequent punching bag. “I simply cannot bear to look at Ba’s face,” he once gushed about her, because she was caring for him while he was sick. “The expression is often like that on the face of a meek cow and gives one the feeling as a cow occasionally does, that in her own dumb manner she is saying something.” When Kasturba came down with pneumonia, Gandhi denied her penicillin, even though doctors said it would cure her; he insisted the new medicine was an alien substance her body should not take in. She succumbed to the sickness and died in 1944. Just years later, perhaps realizing the grave mistake he’d made, he wilfully took quinine to treat his own malaria. He survived.

3 days ago
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Thank you for the opportunity!

3 days ago
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thank you!

3 days ago
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Thanks for the giveaway!

3 days ago
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Good luck to everyone

2 days ago
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thank you

2 days ago
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Hope to win

2 days ago
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thx for the giveaway!

2 days ago
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thanks

2 days ago
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