The smile says it all

 October 2 is always the day for all these pious homilies heaped on the Mahatma. At times, i feel though that he would have  chuckled heartily at all the serious heavy stuff.

Undoubtedly, Gandhiji was a powerhouse of very many great qualities. Remarkable, however, in my opinion was his ability to laugh. His pics often show a very transparent child like exuberant smile. Absolutely surely it was without any malice.  

That smile was very much there, and always. The anecdote with the King of England and/or Churchill (as both the versions are quite quoted) and the clothes he wore is too famous to merit a repeat mention.

In my opinion, because he could laugh at the incongruities with a slight touch of gentle irony, he could own up honestly his own youthful blunders. Let me give an example. From "My Experiments with Truth" is often quoted a much anthologised piece wherein he laughs at his own awkward attempts to dance, to play the violin, to be the perfect English gentleman. Such limpid honesty would not be possible without a genuine chuckle at his own younger self.

May be, one could go a step further, and maintain that he could narrate that insult in South Africa dispassionately because he could with a gentle irony note the incongruity of it all. 

In other words, laughter, too, was a mode he used to open up the negativities of the contexts he faced throughout his personal and political career. In a way, the very notion of non-compliance is an attempt at mildly pointing out to the other person the incongruities in his stance as perceived from this side, the non-dominant one.

Laughter anyways is always the withering weapon of the weak. Look at the Fool or even the Mad Tom avatar of Edgar in Shakespeare's King Lear. Both the Fool and Tom clothe in comedy the withering comments on the goings-on. Not to forget Falstaff, I can multiply literary examples million fold. Even in classical Sanskrit drama, there is a "vidushak", the court clown, who used the 'hasya ras", the comedy, to comment on the really ludicrous, even when it pertained to the all powerful monarch. Even in popular tales, we have a Birbal, a Tenali Ram, for instance, who poke fun at the asinine stupidities in the higher echelons.

Well, to get back to Gandhiji, may be, it was this feathery touch that made him accessible to a Bollywood adaptation? Possibly! I have not seen the movie though. In brief, laughter says it all; his knowing take, gentle though, on the ways of the world, may be.

Pratima@Long live laughter, the truly non-violent method of non-co-operation!