Mahatma tamed his anger for ultimate peace

The world remembers Mahatma Gandhi with reverence and gratitude for showing people the path of peace to do and crack the toughest.

Without writing anything beyond on the magnanimous personality, the father of the nation, I would just share a different aspect of his life that we all may have known of but worth emulating. I recently came across the some extracts from the book “Gift of Anger” authored by Arun Gandhi the fifth grandson of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or “Mahatma Gandhi” that talks of the ten extraordinary life lessons that he learnt during his two-year stay at Sevagram Ashram, Wardha as a child.

While the other nine you have to read through the book, the one aspect that stood out which I want to share is a great quality of how Gandhiji converted his anger into gift. The book vividly describes this quality of the Mahatma as it says, “We have learnt to abuse the power of anger that cause death, destruction, but anger could be a powerful and useful emotion if we learn to channel the energy constructively”. We all know how against the toughest circumstances of India’s independence struggle where anybody could have lost his cool, the Mahatma treaded the path with ease not that he did not experience extreme emotions like anger but made that a tool of his strength.

What astonished me of the above lines of the book was that while Mahatma Gandhi synonymous to peace or better known as an apostle of peace was hot minded like any usual human being but what stood him apart was the control he had on the reign of his temperament. He firmly gripped it to not let the emotions rule him.

When Gandhiji faced injustice in South Africa he moved to anger but instead of abusing the emotion, he chose to use it to find a solution. The book vividly touches on how anger if used intelligently help focus on the problem. When we abuse anger, we focus on the object or person we are angry with. As civilised humans, we need to learn to focus on the problem and not the person the message of the book.

Undoubtedly the root of all the evil that we see and experience today is anger. According to Arun Gandhi one great lesson he has imbibed from his grandfather that he has highlighted is the need to channel anger such that it ultimately does good to harm. In a flash of anger, one does things and says things that can change the course of the life. Once done, we usually regret on them but to no use as it is too late by then. Every one needs to ponder on this unsaid message of Mahatma Gandhi according to the author.

Harvard University findings on the subject too say more than eighty percent of the violence we experience is due to anger. So, if we learn to use this emotion intelligently, we can reduce violence by eighty percent. Learning to harness the energy of anger for constructive purposes is a lifelong exercise, priceless!

Let us all resolve on the birth anniversary of the father of the nation to shun anger by way of intelligently putting it in ways to reap benefit from this emotion to solve problem rather than aggravate them. If we are able to understand this quality of the Mahatma it will be a big homage to his soul and our personal selves. 

More on how Mahatma Gandhi took control on his anger can be more explicitly read in Arun Gandhi’s “Gift of Anger”.