On a strange day when it’s hard to know how to react to the news, it’s heartening that the #stampoftheday project makes me pause and ponder Mahatma Gandhi, who was born on October 2, 1869 and who appeared on the 10th Champions of Liberty stamp, which was issued in January 1961.
Gandhi, of course, employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India’s independence from British rule, and effort that inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. A measure of his impact is the fact that Gandhi reportedly has appeared on stamps issued by more than 150 countries, which reportedly makes him “the most stamped person in the Universe.”
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Revati Natesan, an engineer and mother of two, began collecting those stamps, an effort that not only led her to mount exhibitions of those stamps but also to use those stamps to advance the work of the ThinkGlobal Arts Foundation, a non-profit she started with a mission to spread peace around the world.
Her collection had several notable stamps. There’s an Indian stamp that cost the equivalent of $10, which Natesan found ironic because Gandhi, who was known for living simply, was so frugal that he even recycled post cards. There’s a stamp issued in 2000 by Palau, an island nation off the coast of Australia, to mark the new millennium that shows Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela—three men who used nonviolent civil disobedience to eliminate oppression and spread freedom.
And in 2000, the Republic of Mordovia, which is part of the Russian Federation, issued a stamp honored the Oscar-winning movie “Gandhi” with the text, “It took one remarkable man to defeat the British Empire and free a nation of 350 million people. His goal was freedom for India. His strategy was peace. His weapon was his humanity. “But when asked what her most precious Gandhi stamp was, Natesan said, “It is not the stamp but his message, his life. Here was an ordinary man, in many ways no different from any of us, who through sheer honesty and tenacity was able to grow and go beyond to inspire others around the world to higher levels of being.”
In fact, Google “Gandhi quotes” and you will quickly find many wise words that are still appropriate for our times. Here’s five that strike me as particularly appropriate for our time:
- “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”
- “Permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence.”
- “Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love.”
- “It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.”
- “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
Be well, do the right thing, stay safe, learn as if you were to live forever, fight for justice, conquer your opponents with love, and work for peace.