Oct 4, 2026 · 2 hr 17 min · 10 segments
Mohandas Gandhi lived a life of action, wrote furiously for decades, constantly examined himself & the world, & kept changing. He contained multitudes. Welcome to episode 10 of Watching the Wheels…
Amit VarmaHost
Shruti RajagopalanHost
Pranay KotasthaneHost
So why don't we have an episode on the great man? And, you know, it's almost a cliche of mine.
And, you know, Shruti and Pranay will laugh at this, that I keep saying we contain multitudes.
And this is especially important to remember in modern times, because unfortunately, the age that we are in with social media and its incentives.
the discourse has become incredibly polarized and everybody wants to pass judgment on everyone else to show their own virtue and their own knowledge and people take extreme positions and they look at the world in manichean ways that everything is good or evil either you're good or you're bad And this is simply a silly way to look at history and to look at historical figures.
You know, all of us at one level, I'll disagree with Shruti and say that Gandhi didn't contain any more multitudes than other people.
But this appears often especially true of people who had decades in the public eye as gandhi did as ambedkar did and so many other people so when you look back on them it's really silly to look back on people like that and say oh he was great and you can't say anything bad about him or oh do you know he did this or he did that and we've completely got to cancel them and pull their statues down now And that just sounds completely crazy to me because, hey, we contain multitudes.
Albert Einstein once said that in generations to come, we'll scarce believe that such a man walked upon this earth.
You know, Gandhi was remarkable and he was also ordinary and he was also flawed in ordinary ways.
So what we want to do in this episode is look back at some of the qualities of Gandhi.
So why don't we have an episode on the great man? And, you know, it's almost a cliche of mine.
And, you know, Shruti and Pranay will laugh at this, that I keep saying we contain multitudes.
And this is especially important to remember in modern times, because unfortunately, the age that we are in with social media and its incentives.
the discourse has become incredibly polarized and everybody wants to pass judgment on everyone else to show their own virtue and their own knowledge and people take extreme positions and they look at the world in manichean ways that everything is good or evil either you're good or you're bad And this is simply a silly way to look at history and to look at historical figures.
You know, all of us at one level, I'll disagree with Shruti and say that Gandhi didn't contain any more multitudes than other people.
But this appears often especially true of people who had decades in the public eye as gandhi did as ambedkar did and so many other people so when you look back on them it's really silly to look back on people like that and say oh he was great and you can't say anything bad about him or oh do you know he did this or he did that and we've completely got to cancel them and pull their statues down now And that just sounds completely crazy to me because, hey, we contain multitudes.
Albert Einstein once said that in generations to come, we'll scarce believe that such a man walked upon this earth.
You know, Gandhi was remarkable and he was also ordinary and he was also flawed in ordinary ways.
So what we want to do in this episode is look back at some of the qualities of Gandhi.
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