It was a happy idea to start an institution named after Gandhiji for the purpose of cultural advancement. Mahatma Gandhi lived for nearly eighty years. During this long period there was hardly any aspect of life which he did not touch. Those of us who had the opportunity of living when he lived and worked have been really very fortunate. Generations yet unborn will recall with wonder and admiration how millions of us could see him walking this land, talking to people and actually working with his hands. In the course of his eventful life he gained unparalleled fame as a political leader. But it will be only a partial view of his life if we think that he was merely a political leader. His political career assumed importance because he fought for the freedom of the country with his unique weapons of truth and non-violence. Not that others before him did not think of freedom of the country or work for it, in fact, many devoted their whole life to this mission. The unique contribution of Gandhiji's lay in the fact that he placed in our hands weapons that brought us our freedom. Non-violence and Satyagraha, on which he insisted, were not intended only for political purposes, he looked upon them as the fundamental principles of his life and applied them to every question that came up to him for consideration. He did not claim, at any time, to have evolved a philosophy or a system of philosophy. He was never tired of saying that instead of writing a thesis, he was engaged in the actual application of his principles to concrete problems that came up before him and if we turn over the pages of his writings, we can see time devoting column after column to very small and minor items. To him a small item was not unimportant if it involved a question of principle. He was so cautious about the application of his principles that he evolved a whole series of propositions which applied to the life of man. A small incident like the shooting of a monkey or the killing of a calf would attract his attention as much as the big question of the winning of Swaraj. If he was so very careful about his principles and so very methodical about their application, that he should take a comprehensive view of things.It is quite true that every problem cannot be solved through Ahimsa. Everything has its own action and reaction. In the world of today, we find that countries have been fighting countries and nations have been fighting one another for many a long years. Within our generation we have seen two World Wars fought for the purpose of ending war. Can anyone in his senses claim that war has ended or that all this violence which has been there for ages succeeded in ending violence? Whether in the sphere of religion, economics or politics, violence has never solved any question. If it had solved problems, there would have been no problem left for us to solve. But the fact that there still are problems today shows that they have not been solved by the methods so far pursued by Governments. Can ahimsa solve our problems? The answer is none too simple. The application of ahimsa to our present day problems is no doubt difficult, but perhaps it is not more difficult than ahimsa. Take the example of an army which fights. If there is a war in one generation the army is prepared throughout the period for fighting. Every soldier has to prepare himself from day to day and hour to hour for the fight, and apart from the actual soldier, the whole nation has to prepare itself to support the soldiers, and this process has gone on for ages and from generation to generation.Nobody can say that ahimsa has been tried out to the same extent in any country or by any people. The great service that Mahatma Gandhi rendered to mankind was that he gave it a trial in this country. He had to deal with such material as was then available to him. I cannot claim that we were very good material yet, even with this indifferent material he was able to achieve his objective. It should not require much effort to imagine that if it is tried on a bigger scale, we can achieve other nobler objectives also. It is a fact that the world today is beginning to turn towards Gandhiji. With the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb, they have practically come to the end of the tether as far as the other method is concerned. Thoughtful and far-seeing people have recognised that. They are on the look-out for an alternative, and naturally their thought turns to Mahatma Gandhi's method. But, unfortunately, there is so far no complete understanding of that method. It will not be right to think that other people are unable to understand Gandhiji. This is not correct. Submit