Some of the pitfalls of being born on the same day as a famous person is that you are always always and always compared to that great person...right from childhood when your parents are congratulated for having a baby on the same day as the famous person...almost meaning to say "since that person worked so hard already your progeny can now live off his glory".... or the occassions when your b'day is celebrated and you are constantly told that you are in the shadow of a great man who did so many great things...you have a name to live up to.... and all you want to do at that time is to move out of the shadow ....
Well to be honest all that didnt actually happen with me....either my parents didnt expect too much out of a syrian christian mallu girl born on the same day as Gandhi... or it might have been the fact that I was away in the Gulf all my childhood which gave Gandhi Jayanti a distant if not alien feel to it.... All I can say is that for me b'days were all about wearing that coloured dress and standing in the front of the assembly and having the rest of the kids sing you happy b'day.... and precisely for the reason that I was born on Gandhi Jayanti I never got to do that!!!! cos it was always a holiday (yes I was studying in an Indian School in Oman).... so either i would indirectly nudge a teacher and tell her to make them announce my b'day on the 1st or the 3rd or I would just live with the fact that I was never going to ever get a b'day song for me ON my b'day...
ofcourse now I am just grateful that I can be assured a holiday on my b'day and if not anything else I can just sleep .... so this b'day also started off something like that ...until I had a brain wave...why not try to find out a little more about the man I share a b'day with...why not honour him in my own way by going to the place where he lived and touching the same things that he did....after all Gandhi was one of the most influential people of his century and still continues to be one...and in a way find out for myself whether I can ever emulate in a little way the great feat that the man managed to achieve....
So there began my quest for Gandhi in Mumbai..The only shrine to Gandhi in Mumbai is Mani Bhavan...an ordinary looking place where the Mahatma lived from 1917 till 1934...infact he was even arrested from this place ...ofcourse when I first asked my friend Devika for her thots on visiting Mani Bhavan she commented about the excellent food there....obviously Mani's lunch home in Matunga is more popular than the Mani Bhavan where Gandhi lived...hahah ..... the place was as obscure as they come...I had to ask 50 people before they told me the directions to the place...and the place was nothing spectacular..instead i saw dusty books, broken tiles, unflattering paintings and carvings of the man including a very very amateur clay model of his life story..... all in all I felt like I was visiting an ordinary house....not a place which had such a historic significance.... anywhere else in the world they would have had a conducted tour, a video room with pictures and movies, a room with all his famous books ...basically a place where you would feel closer to Gandhi....
I came away feeling sad that we just didnt know how to appreciate our history.... To me Gandhi is the person that made India important...and made people stand up and take note...this is the person that people all over the world like Martin Luther and Nelson Mandela emulated and still remember after years of his assasination....while we have a crystal pathway to mark where Indira Gandhi was assasinated we dont even have a proper marking on the road saying this is where Gandhi lived... all I could feel was a bit of sadness...I dont know whether I will ever be able to do even 1/8 of what Gandhi did....but I do wish I could get to know the man better in my own country rather than through a film made by Richard Attenborough with Ben Kingsley in the lead...
Ofcourse after that soul stirring visit I washed it all down by watching a movie called "Khosla ka Ghosla" which was as funny and bizarre as it sounds...and followed it up with a truly unindian, anti-ahimsa(read non-veg)dinner thereafter....
and no b'day of mine is complete without Christy wishing me...he wished me and then asked in complete innocence what present I am getting for him!!! so when I told him that he had to get me something and not the other way round he offered me his gun...and immediately told "but it is broken"....well he was cute...but I am sure the non violent Gandhi wouldnt approve of a 6 year old boy gifting guns to people I am sure.....
As for the snaps...these are pictures I took of Mumbai while waiting for Khosla ka Ghosla to start.... please let me have your comments on them....
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