ghandi a great leader essays

ghandi a great leader essays Few men have ever had as much of an effect on our world as Mohandas Gandhi, though he used the message of peace and love, rather than war and destruction. One time a prominent lawyer in South Africa, Gandhi gave up practicing law and returned to India in order to help ease the suffering of the repressed people of his homeland. Gandhi's love for people and his religious passion made him a revolutionary in many of his ideas and actions. On October 2, 1869 in Porbandar, India, a region of Queen Victoria, Mohandas Gandhi was born to Kaba Gandhi and his wife. Although his father, Kaba, was the chief Minister for the Maharaja of Porbandar, he and his family lived in a small house and belonged to a Hindu caste of merchants called "banjas" (Iyer, 34) As he grew, Mohandas became a small, shy and skinny boy, afraid of others' opinions. At the age of thirteen, he was married to Kastaurbai, a pretty yet strong willed girl of the same caste. Kaba Gandhi died when Mohandas was sixteen. At eighteen he traveled to England to study law and secretly to see for himself what made the English so powerful. In 1888, he traveled to England to become a barrister-at-law. There were several important influences that he encountered here: the Western material style of life, which he decided not to follow, and in the simple Russian way of living he found: the New Testament, and the Bhagavad-Gita, the bible of the Hare Krishna movement (Fischer, 54). It was here that he developed a sense of the presence of God in his life and the lives of men. Gandhi then returned to India and studied law in Bombay but quickly denounced it, feeling that it was immoral and could not satisfy one's conscience (Shirer, 69). His personal experiences, including being ejected from a train in Maritzburg, of not being allowed the same rights as others lead him to begin a movement to help his people. While in South Africa, Gandhi made himself poor so that he could identify wi...