15/01/2007

reached by his spirit

Gandhi toured the country incessantly, indefatigably, in torrid, humid weather, addressing mammoth mass meetings of a hundred thousand or more persons who, in those pre-microphone days, could only hope to be reached by his spirit. For seven months he travelled in hot, uncomfortable trains which were besieged at all day and night stops by clambouring multitudes who demanded a view of the Mahatma. The inhabitants of one backwoods area sent word that if Gandhi's train did not halt at their tiny station they would lie down on the tracks and be run over by it. The train did stop there at midnight, and when Gandhi, aroused from deep sleep, appeared, the crowd, until then boisterous, sank to their knees on the railway platform and wept.
Louis Fischer - The Life Of Mahatma Gandhi (1982)

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