Staff Writer
Mahatma Gandhi’s fifth grandson Arun Gandhi spoke with Salisbury students, faculty, and community members about the increasing violence in the contemporary world. He noted that his time spent with his grandfather in India prompted him to continue the legacy of his grandfather’s teachings and promote a different way of thinking.
“If one subscribes to a culture of violence surely one will notice a decrease in violence overall, but if one subscribes to a culture of non-violence one will find that violence in the world is greater than ever before,” Arun said as he presented the main arguments of his lecture.
Arun was born in Durban, South Africa in 1934. Growing up he was caught in the middle of the apartheid movement and moved to India with renowned non-violent activist Mahatma Gandhi. There, his grandfather taught him the principles of peaceful actions leading to a peaceful world.
Arun retold a story of a time when he threw away a small, withered pencil that did not hold much value to him. Assuming (Mahatma) Gandhi would give him a new pencil, he did not feel any remorse of the situation. But his grandfather told him how the disposal of a pencil can make a world of difference – literally.
“In the middle of the night [my grandfather] handed me a flashlight and told me to go find the pencil I had thrown away,” he said. “After two hours of searching I found it and my grandfather taught me two very important lessons: One, we must learn to conserve the world’s natural resources and two, affluent societies over consume products and when we do that we take away from others. That’s violence against nature and humanity itself.”
Arun story lead into a series of statistical presentations on how living a modest life and sacrificing wants for needs can help the entire world.