The lesson of a lifetime from Mahatma Gandhi
A childhood encounter taught a future RI president the value of telling the truth
Kahan se tu aaya hai, aur kahan tujhe jaana hai, khush hai wohi jo is baat se begana hai: A person who is blissfully ignorant of where he is coming from and where he is going to is a happy soul.
Ignorance may be bliss for some, but when talking about their life, a person needs to trace the beginning. As a line in a song from The Sound of Music goes, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.”
I was born 11 August 1934 at Birlapur, a town situated on the bank of the Hooghly River in Bengal, India. When the Second World War set in and Birlapur was converted into an army station, I and several of my siblings were sent to live with our grandparents in Pilani, our ancestral home. The journey was an altogether new experience for us. We took a train to Delhi, and from there took another narrow-gauge train. In the middle of the night, we had to disembark at a place where the train stopped for only about half a minute. From there we went on a camel cart, traveling for almost four hours over sand dunes. For a 6-year-old child, it was a thrilling experience to get up in the dead of the night and travel on a camel cart.
We stayed in Pilani for more than two years, from 1941 to 1943. I remember one day rather vividly. It was 1942, and the elders in the family had been talking about Mahatma Gandhi going on a fast or being placed under arrest. Only later did I realize that it was at this time that Gandhi had started the Quit India Movement, demanding an end to British rule in India. That day in school, a few senior students started an agitation, leaving their classes and shouting slogans. Our headmaster ordered the gates to be closed, but those older students jumped over the gates. We younger students could not follow them.
Image credit: Anjali Mehta
I felt anguished, and when I went home, I was crying. My grandmother listened to my story. I asked her if I could get a tricolor flag emblazoned with a charkha, the spinning wheel that was the symbol of India’s independence and self-reliance. My grandmother called a few women who were professional dyers. They provided us with orange and green pieces of cloth. We already had white cloth at home. Within two hours I had a flag with the image of the charkha in the middle.
I got five or six friends from our school and neighborhood. With the flag attached to bamboo sticks, we set out shouting slogans. I was holding the flag high leading the procession. By the time we reached the bazaar that was the hub of the town, we had almost 150 people with us shouting slogans. We were stopped by the police, and four or five of our so-called leaders were taken to the police station to be questioned. We did not have many answers except that we believed in the freedom of our country. My grandparents were concerned when they learned that we had been kept detained in the police station, but they could not do anything. After two hours or so we were released with a warning.
I still do not know what had compelled me. I was too young to be driven by the cause or understand the ramifications of the freedom struggle. In hindsight, it was probably because I felt that I too had to do something to follow in the footsteps of the senior students in school who had defied the teachers to start an agitation.
A treasured meeting
I returned to our home in Birlapur in 1943. The war had intensified by that time. The Japanese had occupied Burma (now Myanmar) and were carrying out sorties over Indian territory. I remember Japanese planes flying over us heading towards Calcutta. In our residential compound, we had a dome-shaped concrete shelter with a refrigerator and some food and water in it. It could accommodate 30 to 40 people. As soon as the Japanese planes were spotted, there would be warning sirens and we rushed into the shelter.
This was a period of acute scarcity. Provisions had to be brought from Calcutta, and they were meager in quantity. We used to get one loaf of bread a week for the entire family. Fortunately, we were growing vegetables and fruits in our compound, and we owned cows, so getting milk was not a problem. Rice was scarce and considered a luxury, and there were restrictions on clothes as well.
One of my most enduring memories of the time was meeting Gandhi. It was sometime in 1944, and the Mahatma was staying at Sodepur Ashram in a suburb of Calcutta. My father had collected some funds to support Gandhi’s campaign to end the custom of untouchability in India. We reached Sodepur early in the morning. Gandhi was in the midst of his morning walk with two or three children and a few followers.
My father had a small pouch of cash that he wanted to present to the Mahatma. But as we approached Gandhi, my father slipped his hand behind his back, keeping the pouch out of sight. After we exchanged greetings, Gandhi, speaking in Hindi, asked, “Why are you hiding what you intend to give?” And he laughed. We touched Gandhi’s feet and started walking with him. I was fortunate to have his hand on my shoulder as we walked around for about 15 minutes.
Truth and consequences
There is another unforgettable episode vivid in my memory. I had received a 5-rupee note from my father, but I lost it. That was quite a substantial amount of money at that time, and I could not muster the courage to tell my father what had happened. I dreaded the punishment that I might receive. My father had once punished me by making me stand on the parapet outside our home. I had to cling to the wall, and if I moved, I would fall down. (I later learned that there was some protection in place in case I had fallen.) When my elder sister came to know of my predicament, she took a 5-rupee note from her pocket money and rubbed it with dry mud. I took the note and then told my father that it must have fallen somewhere in the garden, but luckily I had found it. It was a blatant lie, but I was grateful to my sister for having saved me from being punished severely.
In 1945, I visited Sodepur once again when Gandhi was residing there in his ashram. At that time, one could buy Gandhi’s photographs from the shop in the ashram complex and then line up to have him autograph them. I had 15 rupees and bought three photographs. The autograph seekers were all lined up on one side of a barricade. Gandhi emerged from his cottage, approached the barricade, and signed the photographs. I was standing somewhere in the middle of the line. Gandhi autographed the first of the three photos stacked in my hand and then moved on to the next person.
Image credit: Anjali Mehta
After Gandhi left, I started arguing with the volunteer. I said that I had paid 15 rupees and purchased three photographs, but Gandhi had signed only one of them. From the verandah of his cottage, Gandhi saw the disturbance at the barricade and heard the arguments between me and the volunteer. He asked what the problem was, and the volunteer replied saying that I was arguing about the autographs. Gandhi called me over and made me sit next to him. He was sitting on a mattress with his low writing desk before him. He asked me what I wanted, and I explained that I had purchased three photographs and got only one autographed by him. To substantiate my statement, I informed him that these photographs were not available elsewhere, and the fact that I had three of them meant that I had paid 15 rupees.
Gandhi looked at me calmly and enquired, “Are you telling the truth?”
My reply was emphatic. “Yes, I am!”
Gandhi smiled and signed the other two photographs, but this time he prefixed his short formal autograph with a special phrase: Bapu Ne Aashirwad. Blessings from Bapu. Father.
This was the value of telling the truth, the lesson of a lifetime for me and something I’ve adhered to ever since. If I had had this encounter with Gandhi earlier, I would surely not have told the lie about the 5-rupee note to my father.
The fight against prejudice
One more memory to share. In 1992, during my year as Rotary International president, I was invited to be the chief guest at a reception in the town hall of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. It was in that city, in 1893, that a young lawyer from India named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was ejected from a train’s first-class carriage by a police constable despite the fact that he had a first-class ticket. His removal, as Gandhi describes it in his autobiography, was “only a symptom of the deep disease of colour prejudice.” As the train sped away — without him on it — the young lawyer, seated in a cold, dark waiting room at Pietermaritzburg, vowed to eradicate that disease.
Now, 99 years after that incident, the mayor of Pietermaritzburg addressed me at the reception in the city hall. “Mr. President,” he said, “this is the place where your famed countryman Mahatma Gandhi was unceremoniously pushed from the train to the platform — and now the city is building a statue in his honor.” As he spoke, my throat was choking with emotions, and today, that bronze statue, which was unveiled by Desmond Tutu in 1993, stands around the corner from the Pietermaritzburg city hall.
I have relived my memories of Gandhi on a number of occasions: while watching Richard Attenborough’s great movie about him or when reading books and memoirs. In 1939, on the occasion of Gandhi’s 70th birthday, Einstein wrote, “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.” And each time I read those words, tears come to my eyes.
A member of the Rotary Club of Chandigarh, India, Rajendra K. Saboo was the 1991-92 president of Rotary International. This essay is adapted from his recently published autobiography, My Life’s Journey: A Personal Memoir.
This story originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.