As to what gandhi really was, you may well be right. I don’t claim to be an authority on him by any stretch. But the person he _projected_ was really nice, and I like the person he _projected_. Now if that person was real or not is a completely different question and is orthogonal to my point here. You may as well say, consider a hypothetical man, who lived in reality just like gandhi did all his life. I am sure you can find such pure-minded people even now. I was just searching for a real life illustration of all my points and gandhi came closest, thats all. I swear no allegiance to any god, forget any man .

Second point. You are absolutely right. The thing is that, “act like (cry-)babies” is just a figure of speech and you should not take it literally. When I use this expression I mean acting greedily and stupidly, nothing else. Your point of acting like a newly born baby is absolutely spot on. If the whole world would act like a newborn baby, things would be beautiful and there would be no war, complete agreement .

Have you read the tao-te-ching? Read it sometime. It literally has a sentence which says “The sage is like a newly born baby…” or something on these lines. If you are actually interested in all this, definitely read the tao-te-ching. And read a nice translation, its a really difficult book to translate and some of the translations are utter bullshit.

I would only beg to differ on some points (as u say one might not accept some/all parts) though which at my present level of knowledge seem untrue. One thing is the piece on Gandhi n I say this bcos of a lot of stuff I have come across which have thoroughly changed my image of Gandhi from a mahatma to a very political mean and self centred person. I am not in a position to site all of it here and more so bcos this is a public domain but we can take it offline.

Another thing I feel is that rather than not being a baby, as u say, it is better to be like a newly born baby whose only need and expectation from this world is food, clothing n shelter. He/she is the most contented being when these basic needs are satisfied and doesn’t expect anything over and above it. If we can imbibe that kind of contentedness and happiness I believe that our lives and the world would be a truly happy.

More on this later… These were some views that came into my mind as I was reading your article… Keep writing and do temme when you write such philosophical posts…