ABSTRACT
In a survey conducted by Time magazine in late 1999 about whom its world-wide readership considered the most significant person of the twentieth century, Gandhi came in a close second behind Albert Einstein. The choice seems appropriate; Einstein undoubtedly revolutionized our ideas of the physical world, whereas Gandhi can be said to have revolutionized our ideas about the moral-political world. not only did he succeed in winning political independence for India from the British with scarcely a shot being fired; more significantly, he has served as the inspiration for a series of nonviolent freedom struggles from the Civil rights Movement in the US to independence campaigns in places as disparate and as distant as South Africa, Eastern Europe, the Philippines, and the former Soviet Union. Einstein himself paid homage to him fulsomely: ‘Generations to come will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon the earth.’
