His weekly paper Harijan, 28 March 1936
As Old as the Hills
In March 1936, the Gandhi Seva Sangh held its annual meeting at Savli, a village in the Wardha district. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Jamnalal Bajaj were there with the other leaders. The members wanted to pass a resolution to spread what they called Gandhism. They planned to write books and set up a committee to teach his doctrines. Mahatma Gandhi stood up and stopped them. He told them there was no such thing as Gandhism, and he wanted no sect named after him. Then he said, 'I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and non-violence are as old as the hills.'
People love to turn a person into a system. When an idea belongs to a famous leader, you can admire it without doing any of the work. You can buy the books and attend the meetings, but you never have to change your routine. Gandhiji told his followers that he had not invented anything. He had only tried experiments with two plain rules in daily life. Truth and non-violence are already familiar to everyone, and the hard part is putting them to work.
Therefore
Do not wait for a new system or an expert to explain what is right. Take the basic rules you already know and test them in your work today.
Harijan, 28 March 1936
Mahadev Desai took down the speech at Savli and reported it in his weekly paper, Harijan, on 28 March 1936. The Sangh dropped the plan for the new propaganda committee. Instead of building a school of thought, the members went back to village work. By that spring Gandhiji had left politics behind and settled at Sevagram. It was a small village near Wardha with no roads and no post office. He spent his days on sanitation, spinning, and basic farming. He wrote that the only way to spread truth and non-violence was to live them out in public.
A small reminder, on the desk or the notebook, that you do not need a brand new theory to practice what is right.
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