If the world’s most powerful man looks upon someone as a hero, think the power that hero has on the minds of people. That’s the power of Gandhi. And President Barack Obama is a self-confessed fan.
Obama is such a fan that he prefers Gandhi's company to his other hero, another former American President, Abraham Lincoln.
In 2009, when Obama was visiting the Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, a ninth grader had asked him a tricky question. The student, named Lily had asked the president: "And if you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?"
Obama chuckled and answered: "Well, you know, dead or alive, that's a pretty big list. You know, I think that it might be Gandhi, who is a real hero of mine."
The President went on to say: "Now, it would probably be a really small meal because, he didn't eat a lot. But he's somebody who I find a lot of inspiration in. He inspired Dr. (Martin Luther) King, so if it hadn't been for the non-violent movement in India, you might not have seen the same non-violent movement for civil rights here in the United States."
The Obama-Gandhi connection goes back a long way. When he was contesting for the post of the US president, Obama's slogan, that won him votes as well as hearts, was "Be the change." It was inspired by one of Gandhi's most famous quotes, "Be the change you want to see in the world."
Obama makes it a point to invoke Gandhi on numerous occasions. When praising the people of Egypt last year for their peaceful protests and welcoming the end of Hosni Mubarak's 30-year-rule, he said, "While the sights and sounds that we heard were entirely Egyptian, we can't help but hear the echoes of history: echoes from Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesian students taking to the streets, Gandhi leading his people down the path of justice."
At his old Senate office, there were three framed photographs behind him - Martin Luther King Jr, Abraham Lincoln, and of course, Gandhi. "The impression on the Indian side is every time you meet him, he talks about Gandhi," the editor of an Indian newspaper had once remarked rather unkindly.
A large part of his visit to India was dedicated to exploring Gandhi. "He is a hero not just to India, but to the world," the president wrote in a guest book when he visited Gandhi's modest former home in Mumbai, now the Mani Bhavan museum. He also remarked that it was a "great book" because he read out the entry made by another one of his heroes, King, when the latter had visited Mani Bhavan in 1959. Unlike Obama's more presonalised remark, however, King's entry was a general, "Pretty cool." Obama had also visited Rajghat during his stay in India.
Even during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Obama had invoked Gandhi, calling himself the "living testimony to the moral force" of the nonviolent movement embodied by Dr. King and Gandhi.
Even during his campaign, in one of his most memorable speeches, the US President had said, "Gandhi helped those who thought they had no power realise that they had power and then helped people who had a lot of power realise that if all they're doing is oppressing people, then that's not a really good exercise of power".
Well, there's one powerful fan of the Father of our Nation.
News from - http://news.in.msn.com/gandhi/Features_article.aspx?cp-documentid=5284408&page=0
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