Experiments with Truth
In late 1925 Mahatma Gandhi lived at Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad. Friends had been pressing him to write his life story. A fellow prisoner named Jairamdas Daulatram had asked for it first in Yerwada jail, and then Swami Anand, who managed the printing press, asked for weekly copy. An unnamed friend warned Gandhiji that writing an autobiography was a vain Western custom. He told Gandhiji that people might copy his mistakes or hold him to views he might later outgrow. Gandhiji listened to the objection and saw a way through it.
Gandhiji treated his life not as a finished monument, but as a laboratory. He tested principles on himself before he asked anyone else to adopt them. He ran trials on his diet, his vows, his fasts, and his public campaigns. When an experiment failed, he wrote down the failure as plainly as a chemist recording a broken flask. Most people write their memoirs to justify what they did and prove they were right all along. Gandhiji did the opposite. He showed his mistakes so that others would not have to repeat them.
Therefore
Treat your choices as experiments rather than positions you must defend. When an attempt fails, record what happened and change the method.
Navajivan, 29 November 1925
On 29 November 1925 the first instalment appeared in his Gujarati weekly paper, Navajivan. He gave it the title "The Story of My Experiments with Truth", and Navajivan later published it in two volumes between 1927 and 1929. His secretary, Mahadev Desai, translated each chapter into English for Young India, the weekly he edited. The serial ran until February 1929, but Gandhiji ended the narrative at the year 1921. His later political work was already in the newspapers. He wanted to preserve the record of the smaller, private trials that made the public work possible.
A small reminder, on the desk or the notebook, that every choice is an experiment you can learn from.
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