GANDHI'S FIRST SATYAGRAHA: AN 18-YEAR-OLD STANDS UP TO CASTE BULLIES
The interview in The Vegetarian (June 13, 1891) where Gandhi talks about the difficulties he f aced (he compares them to Ravana's heads) before he was able to come to London. MAHATMA Gandhi, as he informed the American journalist Webb Miller in London in 1931 and later confirmed to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, was deeply influenced by Henry David Thoreau 's essay, 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience', which he read and shared in South Africa in 1906, months before he galvanised mass protests against the Asiatic Registration Act (the "Black Act") being pushed by the colonial regime. Gandhi, though, was no stranger to Passive Resistance, which he in his later life elevated into a moral weapon he called Satyagraha ('holding firmly on to Truth'). He practised it in his first face-off with authority -- nothing less formidable than the influential leadership of his Modh Bania sub-caste. I find this episode to be ageless becau