Tamil Nadu   

In pursuit of the Mahatma within

— Photo: K.V. Srinivasan

S. Kulandaisamy.

What is peace? The Gandhi Peace Foundation in the city has been creating an environment for children to arrive at the answer to that question, says S. Kulandaisamy. As secretary of the Foundation in Chennai, he believes t hat Gandhian philosophy is not a separate entity and that the contemporary use of the term, non-violence, is flippant. In a discussion on the questions and processes the Foundation works with, he talks to J. Malarvizhi about the quest to find the Mahatma within.

“For the ‘well-behaved’ students who have learnt to conform to the pressures they face, we have very little to say. At every level, children have to face the pressures of the given structures of family, the hierarchies on the street and the competition in school.

“Our course can only benefit the rebel, the boy who refuses to obey. These are the children who have the least gap between thought, word and action. In other words, they are the most honest. When we talk to them, it is possible to have a dialogue with their hearts.

“The others have only learnt to pretend better — to these children we can only tell the challenges they are likely to face when reality jars them against their pretence,” he says.

The Foundation works with children from the VI standard upward through workshops, camps and continual interaction. Groups of children also come in on weekends. Some school administrators are surprised by the methods that are adopted. “Principals have asked me why we didn’t talk about Gandhi in our workshops,” he recalls.

He himself has been shocked by some of the realities he encountered. “When asking children in a Corporation school about the worst problems they faced at home, the usual answers of fathers chewing paan, smoking and drinking came up. Then a boy said he had seen a murder — a local rowdy slaying another man on his street. I asked how many others had had similar experiences. Some 17 children out of 80 put up their hands. An almost equal percentage of children in a couple of other schools responded the same way,” he observed.

Real education should make children ask questions that none can answer fully, not make children mug up the answers. So, with no textbooks, no teaching, no advice and a few ground rules that are commonly agreed on, children discuss openly the various approaches to solving a problem.

He proudly recounts the tale of a teenager who decided that he had enough of women quarrelling over their turn to fill water in the mornings. He went around distributing tokens to each family and told them to come in turn, when the water lorry came. “When we ask how we can create peace, we get answers ranging from the United Nations to forming human chains. The one with the quest will talk about immediate problems like making peace with his mother, whom he was rude to in the morning. When the child says, ‘I can create peace’, then the process of constructive acts towards peace can begin,” he believes.

The Gandhi Peace Foundation was set up by a group of eminent people including Jawaharlal Nehru and Morarji Desai and registered in 1964. It has chapters in various cities and the one in Chidambaram provided support to Mr. Kulandaisamy, after he first encountered Gandhian thought while pursuing a course in Chemical Engineering.

The Gandhi Peace Foundation, Chennai, is at 332, Ambujammal Street, Alwarpet.

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