Why Gandhi? Why Now? Celebrating Gandhi's 141st Birth Anniversary with a Candlelight Vigil in Harvard Square on Oct 2

The Association for India's Development (AID), the non-profit I volunteer for, has Gandhi's profile as its logo. AID has as its credo a slogan comprising three Indian words, Sewa, Sanghash, Nirmaan, which roughly translate as Service, Struggle, Construction (or, building something). While this was a credo that AID evolved gradually as it developed its way of working with the underprivileged in India, one cannot but help wondering how aptly it seems to represent Gandhi's life: he rendered service to his fellow beings, he struggled against injustice and he built so many things -- communities, confidence, awareness and a way to achieve self-rule.

To honor Gandhi on his birth anniversary could well be a ritual for AID, especially when it has adopted his profile as its representative symbol.

But as the opinions of the volunteers who attended the vigil revealed, it was not for lip-service that they had assembled in Harvard Square. It seemed more like an invocation to a spirit far more sturdy than them, to a personality that went where angels feared to tread. In times of the global spread neo-liberal policies, of increasing measures to perpetuate extractive industries to feed the first-world ambitions of a section of third-world populations, of violations of human rights as states become more vicious and covetous of power, there is urgent need of someone like Gandhi to stand like a rock before all whose glib logic of welfare-for-all hides sinister intent of cornering the wealth and privileges for the few.

One of the volunteers present observed that Gandhi's methods of non-violence and righteous resistance ("Satyagraha") were being adopted on small scales by Palestinian resisters. Another volunteer highlighted the fact that the Indian government is treating the situation in Kashmir in terms of the number of casualties; not as a human problem, something that Gandhi always understood in his concern for the common man. Yet another volunteer felt that the face of oppression in the post-colonial world was not as simply identifiable as in Gandhi's time. Yet one hoped for the acuteness of vision of Gandhi in discerning all injustices and standing up to them.

Needless to say, the need for the courage of a Gandhi and his vision for a triumph over injustices was sorely felt. In much of the world when xenophobic tendencies are on the rise, as evidenced by immigration laws in Europe and the United States, when particular religions and ways of expressions are under attack, one looks for voices of sanity, human understanding and justice. It was such a voice that Gandhi represented.

Umang Kumar is a volunteer with the Association for India's Development.