I recollected how Mahathma Gandhi dealt with humiliation of the Indians in South Africa by the then White Government (sometime 1910-20): The government made a statutory stipulation that every Indian must carry an identity card. Gandhi found such mandatory demand humiliating. The government came down and offered to repeal the mandatory provision provided all Indians agreed voluntarily acquire the card. Gandhi consented. But after all the Indians acquired the card the government reintroduced it as a mandatory statute. A double humiliation. Gandhi then announced and carried out a program of burning of all identity cards in a bonfire in a public square. (I may be inaccurate on certain facts and nuances of the episode but I remember the episode broadly for the moral creativity of Mahathma Gandhi--getting even in a non-violent way with public, state-inflicted collective humiliation through collective public action of defiance. More accurate details must be available in Mahathma Gandhi's autobiography 'My Experiments with Truth' and Erik Erikson's classic, 'Gandhi's Truth: the Origins of Militant Non-Violence' and innumerable publications by and about Mahathma Gandhi). There are other episodes of humiliation in Gandhi's life which he has candidly recorded in his autobiography.

How Gandhi dealt with humiliation is a study that merits undertaking. His way was different from the way it was dealt with by other leaders of the Indian Renaissance. His weapon of 'Sathyagraha' is one normative response to humiliation.

The readiness with which we recognise and agree with the content and message of a book is the measure of its worth and greatness. That was, for example, my response when I read Jean Paul Sartre's discovery of immeasurable freedom in our psyche, buried deep beneath the debris of our individual and collective repressions. Again when I read Winston Churchill's moral of the II World War 'goodwill in peace; resolution in despair; defiance in defeat and magnanimity in victory'. and many other such writers.

Raja Ganesan