The good boatman

Like I remember we've done two episodes on Gandhi and obviously I won't, you know, repeat any of the stuff in that.

But I remember at the end of the second recording, I asked you for more recommendations and I had read a ton of books on Gandhi, but you recommended a beautiful book I hadn't yet read, which was A Good Boatman by Rajmohan Gandhi, which had essays on Gandhi across various themes similar to what you have tackled.

I wonder, so what... made you decide to sort of do your own synthesis of this? Why was Gandhi still on your mind?

I mean, I'll have to go back 30 years.

So if he's going to give up like his standard means ends compatibility or testing, there is this one particular end which is to get India freedom, which ranks above everything else.

And I got this insight when I read Rajmohan Gandhi's The Good Boatman, which is his shorter biography of Mohandas Gandhi.

So, you know, Raj Mohan Gandhi has also written like the larger or longer biographies.

This is a very specific point that he makes.

I don't know...

I don't know enough about Gandhi's point of view on why, you know, these two movements that don't seem to have that much in common except a common enemy shared sort of became strange bedfellows.

But my only reference point for this or a way to explain it, not defend it, is to go back to Rajmohan Gandhi's The Good Boatman.

You know, in his... sort of rank order preference or rank order political motivations.