The Socrates Express

8. How to Fight like Gandhi

11:02 a.m. At Baroda House, headquarters of India’s Northern Railways. Attempting to obtain a ticket on the Yoga Express, from New Delhi to Ahmedabad. Odds of success: not good.

When I first heard of the Yoga Express, I knew I had to ride it, and was prepared to contort myself to get a ticket. To be clear: my yoga practice is strictly theoretical. “Yoga Express” appealed to me. It suggests a fast track to enlightenment. Then there is the train’s destination: Ahmedabad, the city where Mahatma Gandhi, my philosopher-hero, established his first ashram on Indian soil and from where he launched his famous Salt March, a pivotal moment in the struggle for India’s independence.

A train journey of a thousand miles begins with a single reservation. Obtaining one on Indian Railways is a process that, since its inception in 1853, has meant enduring hellish queues and navigating a bureaucratic maze. In the digital age, hell has migrated online. It takes me a good three hours to create an account, only to discover the Yoga Express is fully booked. I add my name to the wait list and download an app to track my progress. I quickly move up from number 15 to 8 and then number 1. Promising.

My friend Kailash consults a travel agent who says, “No problem.” A friend of his who works for Indian Railways also says, “No problem.” The obvious conclusion: big problem. In India, nothing is final until it’s final, and not even then. Every ending is a beginning. Every finale contains a tacit to be continued.

Number one sounds impressive, I realize. But this is India, a country that invented the concept of zero and is on speaking terms with infinity. What is a number? It is maya, illusion. As the ancient Stoics observed, if you’re drowning it matters not whether you’re one hundred feet underwater or one foot. Drowning is drowning. The wait list is the wait list.

“Why don’t you fly to Ahmedabad?” asks Kailash. It’s quicker and easier than the train, and only slightly more expensive.

He’s right, but I cannot fly. Gandhi didn’t fly. Not once. He took trains, and so will I. Gandhi firmly believed the means matter more than the ends. Not whether you win or lose but how you fight. Not where you go but how you get there. I will not fly. I will take a train. I will take the Yoga Express.

The situation, I decide, calls for drastic, analog measures. Before long, I am in the office of a railway official, one Mr. Singh, a trim, balding man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a sour expression. I hurriedly explain my predicament. Can he help?

It’s a rhetorical question. I know Mr. Singh can help. In India, power is directly proportionate to office size. Mr. Singh is clearly a man of power. I count no fewer than three separate sitting areas; the ceiling touches the heavens. With a stroke of his pen, a click of his keyboard, he could secure me a seat on the Yoga Express.

“It’s complicated,” he says, as if we were discussing integral calculus and not a train reservation. A certain number of seats are set aside for VIPs, he explains. “And VVIPs, too,” he adds.

I am tempted to resort to violence, but restrain myself. Gandhi would not approve. Violence harms the perpetrator as well as the victim, he said, and I don’t want to harm myself, not yet.

I try charm instead. I explain my lifelong fascination with Gandhiji, using the honorific suffix, and how I believe his ideas remain relevant today.

The pain on Mr. Singh’s face grows. I can see him weighing his options: risk disappointing a foreigner, a guest (one with a keen interest in Gandhiji, no less), or risk the wrath of a member of Parliament or some other uppity bigwig.

I never stood a chance. Go to the Foreign Quota Office at New Delhi Railway Station, he says. They can help, he assures me. We both know they cannot.

I thank Mr. Singh for his time, and walk down the hallway to the thick sludge of particles that passes for air in New Delhi. My quest for a seat on the Yoga Express has ended. Or, to put it in Indian terms, it has begun.

I am walking to the subway station with my friend Kailash. The air is fresh today, he tells me, freshness being relative in this, one of the world’s most polluted cities. The air quality is in the “hazardous range,” though slightly less hazardous than yesterday.

We pass two men sweeping the street with rattan brooms, kicking up a cloud of dust, as if Delhi needed more of that.

“Better wear your mask,” says Kailash.

I reach into my pocket and fumble for the flimsy black-and-gray cloth mask that, the clerk assured me, would protect my lungs. It cost the equivalent of $1.50. I am skeptical.

Gandhi would be alarmed but not surprised by the sorry state of India’s alleged air. More than a century ago, he warned of the dangers of industrialization. India’s future, he said, lies with her villages, not her cities. From a coldly economic sense, he was wrong. India’s cities are booming, its villages impoverished. You can breathe in the villages, though.

We pass a small group spread across a blanket, right on the sidewalk. A girl, not more than six years old, is looking at a book. She is barefoot and covered in a layer of grime. Two young adults are pointing to the book and speaking to her in Hindi.

“Tutors,” explains Kailash. The girl is a beggar. She’s never seen the inside of a school, so these volunteers bring the school to her. Gandhi would approve of this selfless act. That’s the thing about India. Just when you’re ready to write it off you stumble across unexpected kindness and your faith is restored.

We step into a Delhi Metro station. It’s like entering another world. Everything is shiny and new and clean. “Delhi’s lifeline,” Kailash says proudly. We’re about to step onto a departing train but I hesitate. It’s awfully crowded. Should we wait for the next car?

“No,” says Kailash. “It will be just as crowded. Office hours.”

I point out that today is Sunday.

“India,” says Kailash, as if that explains all, which it does.

We squeeze on board, and I hear the chipper words I haven’t heard since London. “Please Mind the Gap.” In India, the gaps are wider and more treacherous. Extra mindfulness is required.

Mohandas K. Gandhi wasn’t ambivalent about much. Except trains. When two American women asked him if it’s true he opposed railways, he replied, “It is and it is not.”

On the one hand, Gandhi saw the railroad as just another way for Britain to keep India under her thumb. And, like other philosophers I’ve encountered, he was wary of excessive speed. “Is the world any the better for quick instruments of locomotion?” he asked. “How do these instruments advance man’s spiritual progress? Do they not in the last resort hamper it?” Yet it was his travels by rail, almost always in third class, that enabled him to crisscross India, touching lives and rallying masses.

One train journey changed Gandhi’s life, and the course of history. It was 1893. Gandhi had arrived in South Africa only a week earlier. His law firm dispatched him from Durban to Pretoria to handle an important case. They booked him a first-class ticket for the overnight journey. When the train reached Maritzburg station, a white passenger entered the compartment, took one look at Gandhi, and summoned the conductor, who insisted Gandhi move to third class.

“But I have a first-class ticket,” Gandhi said.

“That doesn’t matter,” replied the conductor. No “coloreds.” Gandhi refused to leave. A policeman removed him from the train.

It was a bitterly cold night. Gandhi’s overcoat was in his luggage, which he was too proud to request. So he shivered, and pondered. Should he retreat to India or remain in South Africa and fight injustices like the one he had just experienced?

By dawn, he had his answer: “It would be cowardice to run back to India without fulfilling my obligation. The hardship to which I was subjected was superficial—only a symptom of the deep disease of color prejudice. I should try, if possible, to root out the disease and suffer hardships in the process.” In that moment, he chose a path, one that, despite bumps and swerves and occasional collisions, he remained on for the rest of his days.

Decades later, when the American evangelist John Mott asked Gandhi to describe the most creative experiences of his life, he pointed to the train incident in South Africa. It’s telling he equated a moment of quiet resolve with creativity. Some biographers have noted Gandhi’s lack of interest in the arts. He rarely read a novel, or went to the theater or an art gallery. He did not possess Thoreau’s eye for beauty, or Schopenhauer’s ear for music. In London, he enrolled in a dance class but soon discovered he had no rhythm.

It would be a mistake to conclude Gandhi was not creative. He was, only not in the usual way. Gandhi’s paintbrush was his resolve, his canvas the human heart. “Real beauty,” he said, “is doing good against evil.” All violence represents a failure of imagination. Nonviolence demands creativity. Gandhi was always searching for new, innovative ways to fight.

We exit the subway station and are promptly lost. Kailash asks a rickshaw wallah for directions but walks away unsatisfied. We stroll a few more yards and find a policeman. He is wearing a mask, a serious one with vents. Mine doesn’t have vents. I calculate the damage being done to my lungs while Kailash asks the policeman for directions.

The policeman suggests a direction opposite to the rickshaw wallah’s. Kailash, still not satisfied, asks a third person for directions. “I never ask one person,” he explains. “I always ask two or three.” Life in India demands constant triangulation. Gandhi, great experimenter that he was, knew this better than most.

We enter the grounds of the old Birla House, as close to home as the peripatetic Gandhi had. The house—more of a compound—belonged to a friend, the wealthy industrialist G. D. Birla.

A familiar peace descends on me. I’ve been here before many times, though I have trouble finding it each time. I am drawn to it, as I am to Gandhi, for reasons I can’t articulate. I like the wide expanse of lawn, the white stone markers, shaped like feet, Gandhi’s feet, and the verandas where I can picture the Mahatma, a young seventy-eight years old, wearing his big straw hat and white dhoti, hunched over a letter he was writing or playing with one of his grandchildren or helping steer the shaky ship that was infant India.

Some places are sanctified by acts of superhuman achievement—the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment, for instance—while others are consecrated by terrible acts of violence. Gettysburg. Normandy. Birla House falls into the latter category. Here Gandhi took his last step, breathed his last breath.

On the last day of his life, Mahatma Gandhi woke at 3:30 a.m., as he always did. He brushed his teeth, using a simple twig, like most Indians. It was a cold January morning. His grandniece and assistant, Manu, wrapped him in a shawl, covering his bony shoulders. He drank a glass of lemon and honey followed by his daily serving of orange juice. His diet was simple, and salubrious. He wanted to live a long life—to the age of 125, he said—and he wanted to purify himself. The fight is only as effective as the fighter. “How can a damp matchstick kindle a log of wood?” he said.

Kailash often accompanies me to Birla House. He is, as I said, a friend, but that wasn’t always the case. For a while, Kailash was my servant.

I realize those words sound harsh to Western ears, but it’s true; “servant” is what others called Kailash, and what he called himself.

We met many years ago, in 1993. I had just arrived in India, as NPR’s Delhi correspondent. Everything about it was frenzied and raw. I needed a place to live, but the apartments I saw were either too pricey or too noisy or prone to attack by flying cockroaches the size of small birds.

Finally I found a flat with heavy wooden doors and a terrace that overlooked a pleasant street. The landlord, an imperious man with tufts of wiry black hair sprouting from his left ear, pointed out the apartment’s features, including Western-style toilets, air-conditioning, and, he added matter-of-factly, a “servant.”

A few days later, the servant loped upstairs and reported for duty. He was skinny, alarmingly so, with mahogany skin and sharp features. His name was Kailash, and he was eleven years old. I was prepared for cultural differences in India, but not this. I started downstairs to confront the landlord, but Kailash stopped me. Stay, he said or, rather, gestured; he didn’t speak a word of English. I rationalized if Kailash, an orphan, didn’t work for me, he’d work for someone else, and who knows how that person would treat him? Washing my hands of Kailash seemed like a cop-out.

And so every afternoon Kailash climbed the stairs and knocked on my door. He was, truth be told, not much of a cleaner: he didn’t remove the dirt; he just rearranged it. But he was naturally kind, honest, and, it turned out, a wizard with temperamental laptops and printers.

Kailash picked up English by eavesdropping on me and my wife. Before long he was parroting colloquialisms like “I’m history” and “Get outta here.” Over time, he told us his story: how his parents died years ago, how much he loved cricket, and how the landlord beat him if he didn’t cook the chapatis properly.

I’m not sure when we decided to help, but it didn’t cost much to hire a tutor, and soon Kailash was in school for the first time in years. Later, when we moved to another apartment, Kailash moved with us. He was, technically, still our employee, but at some point he began referring to us as his parents. This made me uneasy, yet there was no denying our new roles.

I always imagined my relationship with Kailash would follow a linear, screenplay trajectory. Orphaned Indian boy has fateful meeting with bighearted American; boy struggles to overcome disadvantaged youth; boy perseveres and is eternally grateful for bighearted American’s help. But more than a decade after I left India, Kailash and I were stuck in the second act.

Thanks to my quarterly wire transfers, Kailash lived in a tiny apartment in Delhi that was too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. His main companion was a Pomeranian named Envy. When he told me he had turned down a job serving tea, an opportunity he would have jumped at before meeting me, I was angry but not surprised. I had raised his expectations, dangerous in a country of more than a billion restive souls.

My Indian friends watched from the sidelines, skeptical of my efforts. “You’re thinking like an American,” they said, as if it were a mental illness. “Kailash is from a lower class, a lower caste. He can only go so far. Face the facts.”

They’re right, I told myself, trying to come to terms with the possibility that this Indian orphan and I would be tethered for life. Yet I couldn’t shake the naïve idea that one day Kailash would float free into a life of his own making.

And he has. The trajectory proved more jagged than the Hollywood version, but the ending just as happy. Kailash now lives in a ramshackle neighborhood with middle-class aspirations. He is a husband, and a father. A landlord, too. He owns a two-story building. He and his family live on the top floor. On the ground floor he’s opened a small stationery store called Emma’s, named after his daughter. He sells notebooks and pens and Gandhi wallets. Kailash and I are no longer tethered financially. Our bond is made of sturdier stuff.

On this, an unseasonably warm December day, we walk under a white marble colonnade that leads to the spot where Gandhi died.

Kailash knows of my Gandhi obsession. He finds it touching and, I suspect, a bit odd. Most Indians know Gandhi the way most Americans know George Washington: a hazy father figure whose name is uttered with reverence and whose image graces the money in their wallet.

As we pause for a moment, cooling off and absorbing the quiet beauty of Birla House, Kailash turns and asks, “Why do you like Gandhiji so much?”

I’m not sure how to answer. I concede my interest in Gandhi makes little sense. I am not Indian. I am not an ascetic. I do practice nonviolence, but inconsistently, and with passive-aggressive undertones. Gandhi was a leader of his people. I lead no one, not even my dog, Parker, who answers to a higher power: food. Gandhi’s worldly possessions, at the time of his death, could fit in a small shoulder bag. Mine require considerably more space, and I’m still shopping. Yet Gandhi spoke to me, and I listened.

During my three years living in India, Gandhi seeped into my brain. How could he not? His image, if not his ideas, was everywhere: on the money, in office buildings. Even the phone company’s offices featured a photo of Gandhi using a telephone, the enormous receiver dwarfing his small head.

Mohandas K. Gandhi was many things: barrister, vegetarian, sadhu, experimenter, writer, father of a nation, friend of all, enemy of none, manual laborer, failed dancer, stretcher-bearer, meditator, mediator, gadfly, teacher, student, ex-convict, humorist, walker, tailor, timekeeper, rabble-rouser. Most of all, he was a fighter. Gandhi fought the British and he fought bigotry, among foreigners and among his own people. He fought to be heard. His biggest fight, though, was the fight to change the way we fight.

Eventually, yes, Gandhi imagined a world without violence, but he was realistic enough to know that was unlikely to happen soon. In the meantime, we must learn how to fight better.

Think of the married couple that boasts how they “never fight.” When you hear of their divorce, you’re not surprised. Fighting, done properly, is productive. Both sides can arrive not only at a win-win solution but something more: a solution that neither would have found had they not fought in the first place. Imagine a soccer match that ends in a tie but with the field greener and healthier than before the game. Gandhi saw fighting not as a necessary evil but as a necessary good. Provided we fight well.

When the American journalist and biographer Louis Fischer met Gandhi at his ashram, he was surprised to find a fit, barrel-chested man, with “long, thin muscular legs” and who appeared much taller than his five feet, five inches. He “looked very male and had a man’s steel strength of body and will,” wrote Fisher.

Gandhi was obsessed with masculinity. Words like “manliness” and “strength” and “courage” appear frequently in his writing. Even his complaints about Indian Railways were couched in terms of emasculation. “That we tamely put up with the hardships of railway traveling is a sign of our unmanliness.”

The British, Gandhi believed, had emasculated India. He was determined to “remasculate” it, though he had a different kind of masculinity in mind: one deriving its strength not from violence but its opposite.

Gandhi considered it “unmanly” to obey unjust laws. Those laws must be resisted and with great force. Nonviolent force. This, he said, demands genuine courage. “What do you think? Wherein is courage required—in blowing others to pieces from behind a cannon, or with a smiling face to approach a cannon and be blown to pieces? Believe me, that a man devoid of courage and manhood can never be a passive resister.”

Gandhi abhorred violence, but there was something he hated even more: cowardice. Given a choice between the two, he preferred violence. “A coward is less than a man.” Thus Gandhi’s true objective: reclaiming his nation’s lost virility, and on its own terms. Do that, he believed, and freedom would follow.

I am no fighter. I avoid physical confrontations. My one fistfight took place at age seventeen at 2:00 a.m. at a Howard Johnson’s parking lot in suburban Baltimore and ended with a broken nose. Mine. I shy away from more quotidian confrontations, too: calling an airline to change a flight, or a restaurant to inform them I’m running a few minutes late for my 8:00 p.m. reservation and could they please if it’s not too much trouble hold the table for me?

I realize most people, most normal people, don’t consider these sorts of everyday interactions confrontational. I do, and avoid them whenever possible. Ditto the confrontations (anticipated confrontations) I avoid with editors, family, neighbors, and fellow subway passengers. I’m not sure where and why I acquired this avoidance strategy, but it has not served me well. By avoiding small confrontations today, I set myself up for much larger ones tomorrow. I hoped a world-class confronter like Gandhi could show me another way.

Shortly after I moved to India, I began to read Gandhi, and about Gandhi. A handful of books soon grew into a bookcase’s worth. I visited Gandhi museums and Gandhi ashrams. I took college courses on Gandhi. I bought a Gandhi wallet and a Gandhi T-shirt and Gandhi underwear, the least violent pair of boxer briefs I’ve ever owned. One day, while in Delhi, I had lunch with Gandhi’s grandson Rajmohan, an erudite and kind man, now elderly himself. As we nibbled on naan and chutney, I detected traces of the Mahatma: the way Rajmohan’s jawline angled a certain way, the way his eyes flashed, slightly askance and mischievous.

We don’t admire the gods. We might revere them or fear them, but we don’t admire them. We admire mortals, better versions of ourselves. Gandhi was no god. No saint, either. At age twelve, he stole money from his parents and brother to buy cigarettes. He’d sneak off to eat meat (forbidden among his caste), chewing on goat flesh along the river with a friend who, like Gandhi, was convinced it was the Englishman’s carnivorous diet that made him strong.

At the young age of thirteen, Gandhi was married. He was not a good husband. He’d lash out in jealous rages against his wife, Kasturba. Once, he threatened to expel her from the house unless she did certain household chores. “Have you no shame?” she sobbed. “Where am I to go?”

The father of the nation was a lousy father to his children. In the political arena, too, he made mistakes. “My Himalayan blunder,” he called one such bungled campaign. As for his experiments, some went too far. At age seventy-five, he decided to test his vow of celibacy by sleeping naked with young women, including his grandniece Manu.

Yet here was a man who owned his shortcomings. Here was a man not afraid to change his mind. Here was a man who attracted “cranks, faddists, and madmen” and embraced them all. Here was a man who overcame terrible shyness and self-doubt to lead a nation. Here was a man willing to die, but not kill, for a cause. Here was a man who stared down an empire, and won. Here was a man—not a god or a saint but a flesh-and-blood man—who showed the world what a good fight looks like.

Gandhi was spiritually omnivorous. He sampled many religious delicacies, from Christianity to Islam, but it was the Hindu Bhagavad Gita that reliably satisfied his hunger.

Gandhi first encountered the spiritual poem while studying law in London. Two English Theosophists asked Gandhi about the scripture. Embarrassed, he admitted he hadn’t read it. So, together, the three of them read Edwin Arnold’s English translation. Gandhi traveled west to find the East.

Gandhi grew to love his “Mother Gita,” as he called the spiritual poem. It was his inspiration, and his consolation. “When doubts haunt me, when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to the Bhagavad Gita, and find a verse to comfort me; and I immediately begin to smile in the midst of overwhelming sorrow.”

The storyline of the Gita is simple. Prince Arjuna, a great warrior, is poised for battle. But he’s lost his nerve. Not only is he weary of bloodshed but he’s discovered the opposing army includes soldiers from his own clan, as well as beloved friends and revered teachers. How can he fight them? Lord Krishna, disguised as Arjuna’s charioteer, counsels him. The story unfolds as a dialogue between them.

The conventional interpretation of the Gita is that it’s an exhortation to duty, even violence, if necessary. After all (spoiler alert!), Krishna ultimately convinces Arjuna to wage war against his own kin.

Gandhi read it differently. The Gita, he said, is an allegory, one that depicts “what takes place in the heart of every human being today.” The true battlefield lies within. Arjuna’s struggle is not with the enemy but with himself. Does he succumb to his baser instincts or rise to a higher plane? The Gita, Gandhi concluded, is a disguised ode to nonviolence.

Another tenet of the Gita is nonattachment to results. As Lord Krishna, an incarnation of God, tells Arjuna: “You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction.” Sever work from outcome, the Gita teaches. Invest 100 percent effort into every endeavor and precisely zero percent into the results.

Gandhi summed up this outlook in a single word: “desirelessness.” It is not an invitation to indolence. The karma yogi is a person of action. She is doing a lot, except worrying about results.

This is not our way. We are results-oriented. Fitness trainers, business consultants, doctors, colleges, dry cleaners, recovery programs, dieticians, financial advisors. They, and many others, promise results. We might question their ability to deliver results, but rarely do we question the underlying assumption that being results-oriented is good.

Gandhi was not results-oriented. He was process-oriented. He aimed not for Indian independence but for an India worthy of independence. Once this occurred, her freedom would arrive naturally, like a ripe mango falling from a tree. Gandhi didn’t fight to win. He fought to fight the best fight he was capable of fighting. The irony is that this process-oriented approach produces better results than a results-oriented one.

My heroic efforts to secure a seat on the Yoga Express continue to prove futile. I am still number one on the wait list. Still drowning. I refresh the app on my phone. Nothing. I push it again and again, like one of those rats pulling a lever, hoping for a morsel. Nothing.

What would Gandhi do? He would fight. He did fight. Appalled by conditions in third class, he made a “perfect nuisance” of himself. He complained to Indian Railways about the “evil-looking” restrooms and the “dirty looking” refreshments and the so-called tea, “tannin-water with filthy sugar and a whitish looking liquid miscalled milk which gave this water a muddy appearance.” He wrote to managers and directors and managing directors. He wrote to newspapers.

So I persist, as Gandhi surely would. I hop in a taxi and crawl across town. Delhi traffic is heavy today, a statement as self-evident as “the air is polluted today” or “the subway is crowded today.” A certain unhappy consistency undergirds the apparent randomness of India.

I arrive at the station to the usual controlled anarchy, as reliable as the heavy traffic and the dirty air. Passing through a perfunctory security checkpoint, I set off the metal detector. The guard waves me through. He waves with his eyes, lest he overexert himself.

I swim upstream against a river of humanity, then climb a flight of stairs. A sign outside an office reads: “International Tourist Bureau. Rail Reservation for Foreign Tourists.” I take a seat, joining the bedraggled backpackers.

When I’m called to the counter, I flash my wait-list form as if it were a good report card or winning lottery ticket.

“I’m number one,” I say.

“I can see that,” says the man behind the counter, unimpressed.

Mr. Roy is a compact, no-nonsense man. He tells me it’s festival season, failing to add that, in India, home to a handful of major religions and countless minor ones, it is always festival season.

There is, he informs me, one second-class ticket available on another train, the Rajdhani Express. “A very good train,” Mr. Roy assures me.

I’m sure it is. It is not, however, the Yoga Express, and it is the Yoga Express I have my heart set on.

“What do you want to do, Mr. Eric?” asks Mr. Roy, gesturing toward the waiting backpackers, as if to say, “You’re not the only person in this land of a billion souls.”

I am stuck.

“Well?” says Mr. Roy, irritation seeping into his voice. “Do you want the ticket?”

“Please give me a second. I’m thinking.”

“Thinking is very good, Mr. Eric, but please be thinking quickly.”

When Gandhi said, “I represent no new truths,” he wasn’t merely being humble. He didn’t invent the concept of ahimsa, or nonviolence. It is thousands of years old. In the sixth century BC, Mahavira, a spiritual leader of the Jain religion, implored his followers not to “injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.”

Gandhi knew about the Jains. They were regular visitors at his childhood home. One of his spiritual mentors was Jain. Gandhi also read Tolstoy on love and Thoreau on civil disobedience. Nonviolence wasn’t new, but Gandhi’s application of it was. What had been reduced to a dietary rule in India, vegetarianism, “emerged from Gandhi’s hands as a weapon—a universal weapon—to fight oppression,” explains his grandson Rajmohan Gandhi.

At first Gandhi called his new technique “passive resistance” but soon he realized he needed another name. There was nothing passive about it, or about him. Gandhi was always doing something: walking, praying, planning, holding meetings, answering correspondence, spinning khadi cloth. Even Gandhi’s thinking had a kinetic quality, reflected in his alert eyes and expressive face—a “twinkling mirror,” said those who met him. When a journalist pressed Gandhi for a précis of his philosophy, he struggled to answer before saying: “I am not built for academic writings. Action is my domain.”

Gandhi eventually settled on a new name for his new type of nonviolent resistance: satyagraha. Satya is Sanskrit for “truth”; agraha means “firmness” or “holding firmly.” Truth Force (or “Soul Force,” as it is sometimes translated). Yes, this was what Gandhi had in mind. There was nothing passive or squishy about it. It was active, “the greatest and most active force in the world.” The satyagrahi, or nonviolent resister, is even more active than an armed soldier—and more courageous. It takes no great bravery, or intelligence, to pull a trigger, Gandhi said. Only the truly courageous suffer voluntarily, to change a human heart. Gandhi’s soldiers, like soldiers everywhere, were willing to die for their cause. Unlike most soldiers, they were not willing to kill for it.

“These things happen in a revolution,” Lenin reportedly said in defense of the mass executions he ordered. Not in Gandhi’s revolution. He’d rather see India remain shackled to Britain than gain her independence through bloody means. No man, said Gandhi, “takes another down a pit without descending into it himself.” When we brutalize others, we brutalize ourselves. This is why most revolutions fail in the end. Confusing means and ends, they devour themselves. For Gandhi, the means never justified the ends. The means were the ends. “Impure means result in impure ends. We reap exactly as we sow.” Just as you can’t grow a rosebush on toxic soil, you can’t grow a peaceful nation on bloody ground.

Like Rousseau, Gandhi was a lifelong walker. Unlike Rousseau, his strides were quick and purposeful. The determined walk of protest. One morning in 1930, Gandhi and eighty of his followers set out from his ashram in Ahmedabad, heading south, toward the sea. They covered twelve miles a day, sometimes more. By the time they reached the coast, the eighty followers had swelled to several thousand. They watched as Gandhi bathed in the Arabian Sea, then scooped up a handful of salt from the natural deposits, in blatant violation of British law. The great Salt March marked a turning point on the road to independence. Gandhi had walked into the hearts of sympathetic people everywhere.

Shortly after, Gandhi announced his intention to raid the Dharasana Salt Works, near Bombay. Webb Miller, a correspondent for United Press International, witnessed the confrontation firsthand. He watched as Gandhi’s followers approached the stockpile of salt in silence. The police were waiting for them.

The officers ordered them to retreat but they continued to step forward. Suddenly, at a word of command, scores of native policemen rushed upon the advancing marchers and rained blows on their heads with their steel-shod lathis. Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whack of the clubs on unprotected skulls. Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. The survivors, without breaking ranks, silently and doggedly marched on until struck down.

As he watched the horrific scene unfold, Miller wrestled with conflicting feelings. “The western mind finds it difficult to grasp the idea of nonresistance. I felt an indefinable sense of helpless rage and loathing, almost as much against the men who were submitting unresistingly to being beaten as against the police wielding the clubs.”

Like Miller, you might wonder: What was wrong with the Gandhians? Why didn’t they fight back?

They did, Gandhi would reply, only nonviolently. They confronted the police with their presence and their peaceful intentions. Had they fought back physically, they would have provoked more anger from the police—anger, in their minds, now justified. Gandhi found such escalation silly. Any victory earned through violent means is illusory; it only postpones the arrival of the next bloody chapter.

It takes time to soften hearts. Progress isn’t always visible to the naked eye. After the raid on the salt works, and the brutal response, nothing appeared to have changed. India was still a British colony. Yet something was different. Britain had lost the moral high ground, as well as her appetite to bloody those who steadfastly refused to answer hate with hate.

Gandhi never saw nonviolence as a tactic, “a garment to be put on and off at will.” It is a principle, a law as inviolable as the law of gravity. If he’s right, then we’d expect nonviolent resistance to succeed everywhere, and at all times, just as gravity works whether you’re living in London or Tokyo, in the eighteenth century or the twenty-first. Does it, or was Gandhi a one-off, a fluke?

In 1959, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to India and met with Gandhians, including member of the Mahatma’s family. The trip made a deep impression on King and, a few years later, he deployed the “stern love” of nonviolent resistance in the civil rights movement. Nonviolence has succeeded elsewhere, too: in the Philippines in the 1980s, and in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. In a comprehensive study of some three hundred nonviolent movements, researchers Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan found the strategy worked more than half the time (and was partially successful in another quarter of the cases they studied).

One obvious case where nonviolence didn’t work, where it couldn’t work, is with Adolf Hitler. In 1939 and 1940, Gandhi wrote a series of letters to Hitler, urging him to take the path of peace. Shortly afterward, in what is surely one of history’s most wrongheaded statements, Gandhi said: “I do not believe Herr Hitler to be as bad as he is portrayed.” Even after World War II, when the enormity of the Holocaust became known, Gandhi suggested the Jews “should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves from the sea into the cliffs.… It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.”

What are we to make of such obviously misguided, naïve comments? Was the “half-naked fakir,” as Churchill called Gandhi, a fraud?

I don’t think so. It would be a mistake to dismiss his ideas because they don’t work everywhere and all the time. Maybe Gandhi’s law of love is less like gravity and more like a rainbow: a natural phenomenon that only manifests sometimes, under certain circumstance, but when it does, there’s nothing more beautiful.

I’ve learned a lot about the power of nonviolent resistance from my dog, Parker. Part beagle, part basset hound, he is 100 percent Gandhian. Parker possesses the Mahatma’s stubborn streak, and his commitment to nonviolence.

Like Gandhi, Parker knows where he wants to walk and when he wants to walk there. Should I suggest an alternative direction, he expresses his displeasure by planting his not-insignificant weight on his rear haunches and refusing to budge. Sometimes he’ll lie prone, paws splayed, eyes averted. He performs this maneuver—the “Full Gandhi” I call it—in public: on sidewalks, in pet stores, in the middle of busy streets. It’s embarrassing.

Parker doesn’t bite. He doesn’t swat. He doesn’t bark or growl. He just sits there, peacefully yet persistently resisting. He’s not going to hurt me, nor is he going to help me.

My reaction, I confess, is straight-up Raj. I get frustrated. I get angry. Parker, like Gandhi, is conducting an experiment, and I am the subject. How will I respond to an infuriating but thoroughly peaceful provocation? With anger? With violence? If I do, when will I realize the folly of my outburst? Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. That’s fine. Parker has time.

Had he lashed out, the experiment would prove less useful. Preoccupied with my indignation—you bit me!—I’d lose sight of my own culpability and my heart would harden. Parker’s steadfast refusal either to retaliate or relent lays bare my capacity for violence and, once exposed, enables me to consciously reject it. We can only rebuff what we can see. Parker, the little bugger, helps me see.

It is not enough to reject violence, Gandhi thought. We must find creative ways to convert our adversaries into friends. Most violence stems not from an immoral impulse but a failure of imagination. A violent person is a lazy person. Unwilling to do the hard work of problem solving, he throws a punch, or reaches for a gun. Clichéd responses all. Gandhi would take one look at my Parker predicament and urge me to think creatively. Experiment.

So I do, and I’m happy to report that, after a few failed experiments, Parker’s Full Gandhi episodes have subsided. Yes, he’s still prone to bouts of recalcitrance, but these don’t last long, for I’ve discovered that, unlike the Mahatma, Parker can be bribed with bacon-flavored treats.

Is that cheating? Perhaps, but I prefer to think of it as creative fighting. Parker gets what he wants, and I get what I want: to go home. An imperfect solution, perhaps, but a good one. Gandhi once compared his nonviolent movement to Euclid’s Line, a line without breadth. No human has ever drawn it, and never will. It is impossible. Yet the idea of the line, like Gandhi’s ideals, has value. It inspires.

Kailash and I sit on a bench outside Birla House in silence. It’s the comfortable silence of two people with a shared history. Neither of us feels compelled to fill the vacuum with words.

Most Indians don’t appreciate Gandhi, Kailash tells me. They appreciate the money his picture graces. That’s about it. “People say Gandhi was a coward. They think, ‘If the other person is stronger than me, I have to be like Gandhi. But if I am stronger, I can do what I want.’ ” This is, sadly, a common misperception. Gandhi’s nonviolence was a weapon of the strong, not the weak.

What about Kailash? What does he think of Gandhi?

“Gandhi is very wise,” he says. “He has a clean brain.”

I smile at the word “clean.” India, Gandhi once said, must “be the leader in clean action based on clean thought.”

When I first read that, it stumped me. What did he mean? How are thought and action “clean”?

By clean thought, Gandhi meant thought free of “veiled violence.” We might act peacefully toward someone, but if we harbor violent thoughts, we are not clean. He once prohibited his followers from shouting “shame, shame” at those they disagreed with. Gandhi would not look kindly on those who today disrupt the meals of politicians they don’t like. Such protesters may not physically harm anyone, but they have merely “put on the cloak of nonviolence.”

My thoughts are about as clean as the Delhi air. Too often I accede to the wishes of others to avoid confrontation. I register my discontent by silently seething. I fight covertly, uncleanly. I appear docile but am belligerent. Gandhi was not passive-aggressive. He was aggressive-passive. His actions appeared aggressive, or at least assertive, yet scratch beneath the surface and you found no animus. Only love.

In his autobiography, Gandhi recalls the time he wrote a note to his father, confessing to stealing and cigarette smoking and meat eating. Hand trembling, Gandhi handed his father the slip of paper. The elder Gandhi sat up to read the note and, as he did, “pearl-drops trickled down his cheeks, wetting the paper,” recalls Gandhi. “Those pearl-drops of love cleansed my heart, and washed my sin away. Only he who has experienced such love can know what it is.”

Such love is rare, and not often directed inward. As someone who is often brutal to himself, I found it heartening to learn Gandhi also wrestled with bouts of self-loathing. During outbursts of anger, he’d sometimes punch himself on the chest, hard. He outgrew this self-harming and, toward the end of his life, advised a friend, “Do not lose your temper with anybody, not even with yourself.”

Most of us don’t battle an empire. Our fights are more quotidian but, for us, no less important. Fortunately, Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance also works for marital spats, office tiffs, and political brouhahas.

Let’s examine a simple dispute from a Gandhian perspective. You and your partner are going out to dinner to celebrate a milestone. You want Indian food, she wants Italian. You know for certain Indian is the superior cuisine, while your partner is just as certain Italian is the better food. There is a conflict. What to do?

The quickest solution is a “forced victory.” You could compel your partner to dine with you at Bombay Dreams by bundling her into a burlap sack. There are downsides to this approach. Alternatively, you could insist on Indian food, period. No further discussion. Let’s say your partner agrees. You’ve won, right?

You haven’t. The uneasy calm over dinner is illusory. No one likes being bludgeoned into submission. “What appears to be the end of the dispute may be just the opening in another chapter in the conflict,” says Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution. And by resorting to “veiled violence” you harm not only your partner but yourself, too.

Conversely, you could “appease” your partner by agreeing to Italian, yet spend the entire evening seething. This result is simply another form of violence—worse, it is dishonest, “unclean” violence. Better to fight for your principles than pretend you don’t have any.

You could suggest a compromise cuisine. Japanese, for instance. But that means neither of you gets what you want, and meanwhile, the underlying conflict festers. Gandhi was wary of such compromises. He was all for give-and-take but not when it came to one’s principles. To compromise on principles is to surrender—“all give and no take,” he said. A better, more creative solution, is one where both sides get what they didn’t know they wanted.

Gandhi would suggest taking a step back. Examine your position, keeping in mind you possess only a portion of the truth. Are you sure Indian food is superior? Maybe Italian cuisine has merits you’ve yet to appreciate. Examine your attitude toward your partner, too. Do you see her as an opponent or enemy? If it’s the latter, that’s a problem. “An opponent is not always bad simply because he opposes,” said Gandhi. He had many opponents, but no enemies. He strived to see not only the best in people but their latent goodness, too. He saw people not as they were but as they could be.

Get creative, Gandhi would advise. You could, for instance, make your case for Indian, emphasizing how it would be good not only for you but for your partner, too. Maybe she hasn’t had Indian in a while or maybe there’s a new dish at Bombay Dreams she has yet to try. You make your case gently, for your aim, as Gandhi says, is not to condemn but to convert.

It’s now midday, and the Delhi sun has grown stronger. I ask Kailash about altercations he’s had. I’m sure he’s had his share. Elbow room is India’s scarcest commodity. Like Schopenhauer’s porcupines, India’s 1.3 billion souls are constantly calculating the ideal distance from one another. It’s an imperfect science. Sometimes you get pricked.

When attending the Franciscan boarding school my wife and I had enrolled him in, Kailash got into occasional fistfights with the other boys over a stolen pair of socks or T-shirt. Now that he’s a homeowner and landlord, Kailash needn’t worry about stolen socks. Money doesn’t liberate us from disputes, though. It shifts them to pricier arenas. And so it is with Kailash.

He tells me about a dispute with a tenant. He asked her to turn off the light outside her shop after she closed for the day, since a neighbor was taking the light as license to park his car there, blocking the entrance to Emma’s Stationery Shop.

“I said, ‘Please turn off the light,’ again and again.” She grew angry, but Kailash remained calm. For a while. One day he saw her leaving yet again without switching off the light. When he asked her to, she pointed out she, not Kailash, paid the electricity bill. He yelled at her. She yelled back. It was not a Gandhian fight.

“Did she have a point?” I ask Kailash. “Was she right?”

“She was right, but at the same time she was wrong,” he says.

That is, I think, a Gandhian response. Each side in a conflict possesses a slice of the truth, not the whole pie. Rather than trading slices, aim to enlarge the pie.

In the last hour of the last day of his life, Mahatma Gandhi met with a minister in the new Indian government. Afterward, Manu brought him dinner: fourteen ounces goat’s milk, four ounces vegetable juice, and three oranges. While he ate, he weaved khadi cloth with his charkha, or spinning wheel. He noticed the time—a few minutes past 5:00 p.m.—and sprang to his feet. He was late for his evening prayers. Gandhi hated being late.

With his grandnieces—my “walking sticks,” he affectionately called them—on either side, he walked toward the prayer grounds, where several hundred supporters awaited him. Gandhi lifted his hands from his grandnieces’ shoulders and folded them into a Namaste, greeting the crowd.

At that moment, a stout man wearing a khaki tunic approached Gandhi. Manu thought the man was going to touch Gandhi’s feet in a show of reverence. It happened often. Gandhi hated it. “I am an ordinary human being,” he’d say. “Why do you want to pick up the dust of my feet?”

Manu intervened, chiding the man for further delaying Gandhi. “Do you want to embarrass him?” she asked.

The man replied by pushing her—so forcefully she stumbled backward, dropping Gandhi’s rosary and eyeglass case. As she reached down to pick them up, three shots rang out in rapid succession. Smoke filled the air and, recalls Manu, “darkness prevailed.” Gandhi, still standing, hands still folded in greeting, was heard uttering the words Hey Ram, “Oh God,” before collapsing.

Gandhi’s last steps are memorialized here. A pathway of white stone footprints leads along a grass walkway, ending where the assassin’s bullets struck. Kailash and I stand on the last two markers now. Two bare feet: one brown, one white. The stone feels cool against my skin, and not for the first or last time do I wonder what it is about places of death that I find so peaceful.

“Would you do it?” asks Kailash.

“Do what?”

“Live with Gandhi. Would you have joined his ashram if you could?”

Gandhi had millions of admirers, but his closest followers numbered only in the hundreds. Life with Gandhi was demanding. Acolytes adhered to eleven vows, ranging from the easy (not stealing) to the tricky (physical labor) to the onerous (chastity). Gandhi was, as we’ve seen, not always a nice man. He was demanding and, at times, harsh. “To live with Gandhi is to walk on the blade of a sword,” said one follower. Am I capable of such a balancing act? I wonder.

“Yes,” I tell Kailash. “I would join Gandhi.”

As I hear my own words, as if spoken by someone else, I realize they are true. Sometimes we don’t recognize truth until we speak it.

I would join Gandhi—not despite the demands of such a life but because of them. I spend considerable time and money endeavoring to increase my comfort when, I know, that is not what I need. What did Epicurus say? Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little. At his death, Gandhi’s worldly possessions consisted of a pair of spectacles, a wooden bowl (for taking his meals), his pocket watch, and, from a Japanese friend, three tiny porcelain monkeys, signifying “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

Inhaling chunks of Delhi air, I glance out the taxi’s window at the traffic, heavier than usual today. We’re on our way to the train station. Kailash insisted on seeing me off, even though it’s late. I didn’t resist.

As we wait for the train, I get a good look at Kailash. He is no longer the scrawny kid I first met all those years ago. He has filled out, and grown up. He is a man. A good man. I see traces of Gandhi in Kailash. The persistence. The openness to new ways of thinking. The unwavering honesty. The innate goodness.

I don’t mention this observation to Kailash. He’d find it absurd, I’m sure, and more than a little blasphemous. Gandhiji? Me? There was only one Gandhiji.

Maybe, maybe not. Gandhi never saw himself as sui generis. He was not a god or a saint. He was simply a man who experimented with new ways of fighting and a powerful force called love. An Einstein of the heart.

A train pulls into the station and the already frenetic activity on the platform accelerates: porters hauling suitcases the size of small boats; chai wallahs calling out in singsong tones, hoping to sell a cup or two; families holding hands lest they be swept away by the torrent of humanity. The train slows to a stop. A placard on the side reads: “Rajdhani Express.”

I had decided to accept Mr. Roy’s offer for the last remaining ticket on the “good train.” The not-the-Yoga-Express train. It was a surrender, of sorts, a bow to reality. I lost the battle. I failed. Like Gandhi. His dream of a peaceful transition to a unified India never materialized. In his last days, he felt adrift in “an aching, storm-tossed and hungry world.” Despair threatened to drown him.

Yet he never stopped fighting. When Indians celebrated independence at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, Gandhi spent the day fasting, and praying. Soon after, he crisscrossed the young nation, by train and by foot, trying to stanch the bleeding. He achieved his means, if not his ends.

How you fight matters more than what you’re fighting about. I fought well. I recognized an injustice and confronted it. I battled creatively and cleanly against a recalcitrant adversary: Indian Railways. I did not resort to violence, however much tempted to do so. True, the results were not what I wanted, but it is the wanting not the results that lies at the root of my suffering. Besides, there will be other fights. There always are.

Kailash helps haul my luggage on board, reminding me to lock my bags during the overnight journey. I promise him I will. We hug good-bye before he jumps from train to platform. I watch him for a few seconds, then he is gone, swallowed up by the warm Delhi night, thick with pollution, and people: countless souls in motion, negotiating tight spaces and complex relationships, loving and fighting, fighting and loving, usually sequentially but, every now and then, at the same time.

Mahatma Gandhi took one last train journey. Thirteen days after his assassination, his ashes were placed on board a train bound for Allahabad, at the confluence of three sacred rivers. Gandhi’s final resting place.

All along the route, people scrambled for a glimpse of the train, eyes tearing, hands joined in a final Namaste. At night, villagers lit bonfires and torches and cried, Mahatma Gandhi, ki-jai! Victory to Gandhi. The train, outfitted for the journey, consisted entirely of third-class carriages.