| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Mumbai-In an acutely ironic twist of history, the financial meltdown of 2008 coincided with the centenary year of Hind Swaraj ( Indian Home Rule), a brief polemical tract written by Mohandas K. Gandhi. On the surface, the essay deals with questions of colonialism and independence. But within his arguments on those matters, Gandhi embedded a deeper, more universal message-that command over our passions is the essence of civilization. Throughout 2009, while business and political leaders scrambled to reboot the global financial system, scholars and activists in many nations met to reflect on the prescience of Gandhi's text. It warned of a danger more fundamental than mere "irrational exuberance" or the "animal spirits" of overconfidence that John Maynard Keynes saw at work decades later. Gandhi would have seen the crisis of 2008 as the inevitable unraveling of a "Black Age" which equates civilization with bodily comforts and advances in technology. "One has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed," he wrote in Hind Swaraj.
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