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I remember that law student who drove me crazy so many times very well, but now I can picture him in a different light. After understanding Gandhi’s principles, that small man with the perpetual smile, I could finally grasp why listening to him used to infuriate me. Everything he was, I never was; everything he possessed in abundance, I never knew. In fact, I’ve never met anyone else in my life who responds with such intelligence and nobility.
We were eating in the dining hall of the University of London, where I taught law classes, when he tried to sit next to me.
“Don’t you understand that birds and pigs can’t sit down to eat together?” I said mercilessly, trying to get him away from my table.
“Don’t worry, professor, I’ll fly away,” he replied with a smile.
For a long time, I regretted reacting the way I did, but today I know I didn’t harm Gandhi at all; I only hurt myself. I was consumed by anger and decided to take revenge, as if it were a children’s game where one of them can never accept defeat. But I couldn’t bring myself to give Gandhi a bad grade on his last test, because his answers were more than perfect. My last resort was to ask him this question before handing back his graded exam: “Mr. Gandhi, if you were walking down the street and saw an abandoned package containing one bag overflowing with wisdom and another overflowing with money, which one would you take?”
It didn’t take him more than a second to answer me calmly:
The one that contains money, of course.
I would have taken the one that brought tons of wisdom, don’t you think?, I replied in an advantageous voice, to which he again answered me with the exact words to make me burst into hysteria.
“Everyone takes what they don’t have.” Hearing him respond indifferently with that phrase, I took my marker and wrote “idiot” in large letters on the first page of his exam. It was clear that I had disrespected my role as a teacher and that my anger had completely overwhelmed me, but the day I finally understood what Gandhi was doing and what it consequently provoked in me was when, minutes after that awkward moment, the student approached me and said, “Professor, you signed my test but forgot to add my grade.”
Mahatma Gandhi was the man who, against an entire army armed to the neck, decided to lead a people he never asked to take up arms, but rather to produce their own salt from the sea and sew their own clothes. He became the first human being to confront war without resorting to violence, which is why he is credited with a series of important and, above all, wise lessons through which, just as Gandhi did with a multitude, we can all “win” a small war or argument with another person or people, without having to resort to violence.
1. Don’t be selfish
Mahatma Gandhi cared about everyone, not just the people of India; it is known that after the war during which the thinker ended the monopoly that the British possessed through the textile industry, he managed to revitalize the Indian economy and days later he appeared in each and every one of the factories in Manchester to apologize for having caused hundreds of English people to lose their jobs.