October 2 [the Birthday Of Mahatma Gandhi] Poem by Joydeep Sircar

Every year must you come around,
greatest of heroes, most awkward of men,
to shame us with your unsolvable paradox -
the dichotomy between means and end?

Don't you see how monstrous is your demand
that we accomplish collinearity
between defined virtue, motive and the act?
Can we live in axiomatic set theory?

And even in that rigid thought-construct,
as Frege and other logicians sadly found,
there is no escape from contrariness.
Godel showed we cannot prove that we are sound.

Confess, then. Even you had feet of clay.
You knew where your logic was fatally flawed.
Even Ram cannot hold reality at bay.
The permanent way will not turn to sod.

So what is special about your residuum
from that of any other saint we adore?
Is it freedom? It would have come anyway.
Is it service? Vivekananda did more.

Today again, as in other years,
I turn you in my head like a bright stone
uneven in facet that left a giant scratch
across moral history to show it is carbon

turned crystalline at Pietermaritzburg.
Come, father, help me. Was it your trick
to gather human clay, and let Smuts club
and fire it to refractory brick?

Was it the bania sharpness keened at Bar
that measured the bounds Home and decency set
on the use of unresisted power?
The choice of a successor, pliant Harrovian bait

to tickle the ruler's sensibilities?
The use of humour, tiger-swift and neat,
and media power - Bourke-White images,
Fischer roasted in the Wardha heat?

And above all, the renunciation:
to gather power in those gentle palms
like Marcus Aurelius, and then withdraw
from party, partition, midnight delirium?

Aware of hatred, aware of violence,
aware the moral lessons had made no change
in the set trajectories of greed and error,
but still going on alone - ah, that is strange!

What gave you the strength to persist,
knowing the time for your ideas had not come,
that Acton was right? Did you conjure by prayer
the moral apogee, your martyrdom,

as the finale of your Magnum Opus,
not freedom, not Satyagraha, not Harijan,
nor even Non-violence,
but your life?
To show us each the way we could have gone?