Leah Chua February 6, 2008
Grammar and Composition
Gandhi’s Autobiography, an abridged version of Mahatma Gandhi’s writings, captures Gandhi’s personally-penned excerpts of the less-publicized experiments during his life. His novel method of civil disobedience and other lessons of non-violence are some of the highlights of his life from Gandhi’s point of view. Through his strict restraints on bodily wants, practice of everything he deemed beneficial to character, and passionate struggles to better the plights of his race, Gandhi certainly earned the title of Mahatma through self-induced righteousness.
From his birth in 1869 to an upper-caste family in Porbandar, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was instructed in the foundational teachings of influencing Hindi religious books which nurtured a life-long yearning to learn more in such areas. As a child, Gandhi had the habits of a near-perfect child and student – diligently turning in passable homework at school each day and rushing home daily to help out with chores and his father’s business. Of a shy nature, young Gandhi was tempted to eat meat, a practice that his religion and parents were strongly against, by a friend. After secretly becoming a meat-eater on three occasions spanning a year, a profusely remorseful Gandhi came clean with his father on the latter’s death bed. Shortly after his father’s death, Gandhi sailed to England to study law. Before leaving, he made a solemn vow to his mother to abstain from meat at all costs. This vow was painstakingly kept during the entire duration of his life here after, despite exhausting trials of starvation and almost malnutrition in England. Despite his European friends’ intense ridicule and counseling against abhorring eggs and milk, Gandhi soon removed the two foods from the diet he observed in England too.
After graduating from law school, Gandhi returned to India where he tried with little success to establish a law practice; he eventually...