Being Gandhi for a day: Is it all just for the record?

Gandhi has always been a  favourite fancy dress item in schools across the country. Ride through Indian suburbia on 30 January or 2 October and you cannot fail to see miniature Gandhis being taken to school on the back on bicyles and scooters, clinging  on to their loosely-tied dhotis and praying the glue that holds their fake moustaches will hold for a couple of more hours.In the eyes of children, you can see how much role-playing means to them. How much it means to become Gandhi at least for a day.On 29 January,  485 children, mostly of single mothers, marched through the streets of Kolkata in sparkling white Gandhian attire, their walking sticks reaching up to the sky as it were, their hurriedly manufactured metallic spectacle frames falling off their noses, their glued-on  rag-tag moustaches made of raw cotton  trying to give them the respectability of  age.[caption id="attachment_198241" align="alignleft" width="385" caption="Grand daughter of Mahatma Gandhi Usha H.Gokani stands with some of 485 underprivileged children dressed as Mahatma Gandhi during a walk for peace and an attempt to enter Guinness Book of World Record in Kolkata. PTI"][/caption]These young kids made it to the Guinness Book of World records. They bettered the record of 255 Gandhis achieved by a school in Coimbatore in 2010.School children across India are always busy with Gandhi. If not attempting a world record, at last winning prizes and applause with Gandhi speeches.For school teachers, and NGOs, like in the case of  the British NGO Tracks (Training Recourse and Care for Kids) which organised the Kolkata event,  Gandhi offers a ready resolution of all moral problems and a heady mixture of Indian values to inculcate in children. “This peace march is meant to inculcate Gandhi's values and messages in poor children. We don't want underprivileged kids to forget the rich legacy of Gandhian ideology," said Michael Anthony, who runs the NGO.Once the dhotis are unwound and wrapped up and the  Gandhi frames put away for next year's show, there is always the  talk of peace and non-violence left.  And maybe Chauri Chaura  and Freedom at Midnight, to add more gravitas.  So in Gandhi, Indian schools see many solutions to the moral quagmire they have to wade through every day.But maybe it is time for educators to wonder if the dressing up act is becoming a one-day or maybe two-day act (30 January and 2 October) for Indian children.  Beyond the dressing up, do children actually idolise him any more?  Has ritual  taken the place of  reality?Gandhi's life and its mythical aspects  and some of the modern day constructs are a proper fit for any school curriculum.  As a morality fable there is no equal.Here is an essay uploaded by  school kid Jyoti Solapurkar on www. mkgandhi.org."As a child he was not very brave. He was mortally afraid of the dark, of ghosts and spirits, and also of snakes and scorpions. At night he would cry in fear. The maid who looked after him scolded him very often. 'You should be ashamed of yourself,' she would say. "What will you do when you grow up?" She then told him that every time he was frightened he should take the name of God Rama. Gandhiji took her advice, and gradually he overcome his fear."This  tale  looks like a latter-day construct but serves all purposes of Indian moral education. The fear of god being the foremost  value sought after by Indian schools and educationists.The truth, however, remains that Gandhi-ism is fast losing its relevance to modern India. The big country no longer has time for his small scale industry or the Gandhian village-oriented model of development. India has clearly moved on from the slow moving charkha  which symbolised Gandhi’s life and work - that slow tethering together of pure strains to form the tapestry of a nation."The key to making Gandhi’s vision a reality and practicing his values is to persistently subvert selfish wordly pursuits with ethical livelihood," Vivek Pinto writes in an essay on Gandhian values. Such exhortations look out of place in today’s India.That is another matter. But at least for India’s school children Gandhi means something big and great and good. At least for a day.