The month of October reminds us about two great revolutionaries, Gandhi and Guevara - One who lead a non-violent revolution and the other who lead an armed revolution. This year's October 2nd marked Gandhi's 138th birthday and October 9th marked Che Guevara's 40th death anniversary.

I have never liked Che Guevara in my childhood, for the first and foremost reason being he was a Communist. That label itself was enough good reason for me, as a religious boy, to hate him. Christians (and people from other religions, for that matter) stayed away from Communists as they were against religion (the truth is most of the party members are pseudo-atheists who go to temples and churches, like Malayalam cinema director Sathyan Anthikkad had portrayed in his movie Sandesam). I didn't like anything about revolution in general too. Why would people kill others to establish one kingdom over the other, I thought.

Many years later, in one evening of an April, Chechoos asked me if I would like to come along for the screening of the movie Motorcycle Diaries in Jana Samskara Kendra in Thrissur. I jumped in right away as I was waiting to watch this movie as I had seen the trailers on Internet that had clips of two young men taking a road trip across Latin America. It also had a beautiful background score with Spanish guitar strums. What added to my amusement was that the producer of this movie was Robert Redford and I was wondering how come a Hollywood actor like Mr. Redford produce a movie on a Communist, that too one of the most idolized Communists of the last century. The movie began with a handsome, rich, young man who just finished his medical school going on a trip across the Latin America with his friend and bike. He was no different than any other 23 year old, with high spirits, fun-filled, adventurous and what not. But the fun ended up soon as he went past the cities and the rich to the outskirts. He saw the poor, the weak, the ignored ones. And he got changed. Like the selling line of the movie says - Let the world change you and you can change the world - the world around changed him and he changed the world. At least tried to.

All the while before I thought Che was a frustrated young man from a poor family who had to take arms when his life was challenged. But only after watching this movie that I understood how different was the kind of challenge he had in his life. And that left me ashamed for talking aloud about the less-to-none privileged class in the society and finding satisfaction in some small charity actions and feel myself as if I have done something great to the humanity.

I don't know much about the post-Motorcycle Diaries life of Guevara. I have read his bio from Wiki and some other websites though. He has been described as a mass murderer by some people and idolized by many pseudo-revolutionaries all over the world. He must have gotten into extreme measures and he must have chosen the brutal ways in an urge to establish Communist states over the imperial powers. He must have gone wrong. But that is not what I liked about Che. It is the call from within that he accepted. It is the cause that brought him into the struggle. It is the cause we all choose to ignore. The cause. Humanity. It is this cause that makes him different than being just a mass murderer. It is this cause that differentiates him from Hitlers, Idi Ameens or Modis.

To quote from this post of Bhupinder,

I finally found Che in The Motorcycle Diaries, in the deep humanism of a 23 year old student, as frightened by a pair of a cat’s eyes in the night as anyone else in his place would be.

I realized then that to discover Che, one has to trudge through various layers of reality, through the phases in his life and his deeply sensitive reactions to the world that he lived in.

There is a huge distance to travel from Guevara to Gandhi. Unlike Guevara, Gandhi needed a personal experience (the Pietermaritzburg train incident) to enter into the political scene or to think about his countrymen who suffered from the colonialist rule. But he chose the non-violent way, even though it cost the lives of so many of his countrymen. What an irony it is that a non-violent movement had to sacrifice so many lives! It has become a fashion for the pseudo-intellectuals these days to criticize Gandhi for many reasons. They say partition could have been avoided if Gandhi tried. They easily forget the political specturm of those days and how it was gone out of the hands of him to the power hungry ones - Nehru, Patel and Jinnah. Partition of India was inevitable and if not then, it would have happened sometimes later. it is stupid to believe the ideologies that Sangh people try to promote, like India would have been a huge country with Afghanistan, Paskitan and Bangladesh along with us. Imagine the trouble it would have caused. The riots, the differences, the poverty and population. Hmm...

Gandhi stood strong for his beliefs and he lead a peaceful revolution which finally brought the freedom to us. His success was that he became the uniting factor of the whole of India, unlike other less-celebrated freedom fighters in India. He was not just a political leader, but a great visionary, a Guru in all means and people looked up to him. They saw their savior in him and even though he could have easily become a God man he chose to remain as a messenger of peace. He is also not beyond criticism, and he was harshly criticized by so many sections - Hindus, Muslims, Dalits, Communists etc.

I think a person in his youth is prone to be a Guevara and as he grows up, chooses to be a Gandhi. No man is perfect. Everybody goes wrong on some aspect. What we should look for in these two revolutionaries is the fact that they stood for their cause and spent their lives for it. That's something many of us do not dare to do and that is what makes us ordinary people and them, the leaders or idols.

On another note, have you listened to this song, Ahimsa, by K J Yesudas from his first world music album? It is a song he performed at Millennium Concert organised by the World Peace Organisation in Paris along with the Pakistani band Junoon.


Che Guevara image courtesy: Thulasidas
Gandhi image courtesy: Internet