JUNE 30, 2019 • THE WEEK 41day would not support his body.
Gandhi once drew the diet plan for one of
his staunchest critics, Subhas Chandra Bose.
He recommended leafy vegetables to be taken
as salads, dates for a healthy stomach, raw gar-
lic for controlling blood pressure and lemons
and honey to substitute for sweet oranges.THE INVISIBLE HAND
In Gandhi’s accomplishments, the contribu-
tions of his longtime personal secretary, Ma-
hadev Desai, cannot be overlooked. Th ough in
principle Gandhi was self-reliant and shunned
material possessions, he had a brilliant collec-tion of books and people as resources
to seek help from. When he returned
from South Africa in 1914, he brought
along many of his coworkers and 10,000
books and pamphlets. After he set up
the Satyagraha Ashram along the banks
of the Sabarmati in 1915, Gandhi was
in search of a person who could be a
helping hand in his intellectual, social
and spiritual exercises. He found that
person in Mahadev, a lawyer by train-
ing, who offi cially started working at
the ashram in 1917. Writes the scholar
Ian Desai in the paper Gandhi’s Invisi-
ble Hands: “[Mahadev] Desai was at the
heart of Gandhi’s intellectual operation,
helping him refi ne his philosophy.” He
woke up before his boss at 4am to pre-
pare the agenda for the day. He made
notes on all of Gandhi’s meetings, draft-
ed his letters and articles where Gandhi
only had to change the authorial initials
from MD to MKG. Gandhi wrote to Ma-
hadev once, “You have made yourself
indispensable to me.... It is for your effi -
ciency and character that I have chosen
you to help me in my political work and
you have not disappointed me. Add to
this the fact that you can cook khichdi
for me, with so much love.”
Gandhi was an astute media strat-
egist and social scientist, too. No-
where is this streak more visible than
the incredible background work he
commissioned in the run-up to the Salt
March of 1930. At the planning stage,
he sent out notes to villages along the
trail of the march asking for detailed
information on the village population
and its components based on gender
and religion, apart from the number
of cattle, khadi wearers, charkhas,
the rate of land revenue, the size of
grazing plots and the extent of salt
intake. As Ian notes in his paper, “Th ey
plotted a trail for a three-week trek
from Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad
south toward the Arabian Sea, paral-
leling the railway line, which would
be the primary means for maintaining
communication—by both post andG.R. IRANNA
TITLE NAAVU
(WE TOGETHER)
MEDIUM WOOD AND
OTHER MATERIALS
SIZE 15x.5x55ft
YEAR 2012