Reporter: What do you think of Western civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a very good idea.From the Department of “U R Doin’ It Rong”, Mumbai Branch:
Luxury pen maker Mont Blanc has designed a limited-edition pen featuring the likeness of Mohandas K. Gandhi in rhodium on the nib, a saffron-colored opal on the clip, and an engraving of Gandhi’s signature on the barrel, all for the low, low price of $25,000. Mont Blanc has made a donation to the Gandhi Foundation, but is otherwise not donating proceeds from sales to any charity. Realizing that the $25,000 price tag puts this pen out of the reach of all but the richest collectors, Mont Blanc has issued a much more reasonably-priced ballpoint pen that will only set you back about $3500
Sidebar: Here is a piece by George Orwell about Gandhi written around the time of the Partition, shortly before Gandhi’s death, in 1949. During his lifetime, Gandhi was not as globally revered and publicly sanctified as he would become after his assassination, especially in Britain. That air of British suspicion that Gandhi was just another scheming wog pervades the essay, even as Orwell tries to distance himself from such suspicions (without much success, I’d say).
Western adoption of Gandhi as a saint-like personage came in steps, especially as 1960s counterculture looked for non-Western role models to shake up centuries of Great White Men, culminating in the 1980 film by Richard Attenborough that gave American audiences the boiled-down idiot version they needed to grasp his significance (provided they could sit through the whole movie). Reading a piece written by a contemporary, especially someone who would come to earn his own political significance after his own death, is a good way to strip away some of the perhaps-unearned deification. Buying a $25,000 pen is not.
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It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
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