Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Man called Joseph Lelyveld has written a book on Mahatma Gandhi called " Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India." In it he has analysed all of Gandhi's correspondence and referred to letters written to a German-Jewish architect and body builder called Hermann Kallenbach. In his letters Gandhi refers to himself as " Upper house " and to Kallenbach as " Lower house " which is pretty abstruse. Gandhi wrote, " How completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." which is pretty gross. Naturally a lot of heat has been generated by the book. The book has been banned in Gujarat by Chief Minister, Narendra Modi. Union Law Minister, Veerappa Moily thought about following suit but decided against it. Naturally,also, this has created a lot of hot air in the freeloading, pseudo secular, pseudo intellectual English press. One fellow rants about how undemocratic all this is. Another says that this was acceptable language in Gandhi's times which seems hard to believe seeing that men were pretty macho in those days and metrosexual man would never have made it beyond the starting gate. Naturally a feminist had to have her say. She contends that Indians should mature and accept homosexuality as normal. Time was when feminists used to burn bras which would have been fun to watch. Then they tried not shaving their armpits which was pretty gross and did not catch on. Now they are intent on turning every man into a poofter. The most amusing thing about all this is that not one person has read the book because it is still not available in India. Ignorance, it seems, is so very noisy.

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