Gandhi: A Player of Infinite Games. By Vinay Lal

Even radical dissenters have experimented within some boundaries. Gandhi played with boundaries themselves in nearly every domain of life - politics, sexuality, culture, knowledge. He was uniquely a player of infinite games with a vision of life as play... The African American activist, Bayard Rustin, is acknowledged by scholars as one of the principal figures in the Civil Rights Movement of the United States and the chief architect of the famous March on Washington in 1963 where Martin Luther King, Jr. mesmerised the large gathering with his “I Have a Dream” speech, an oracular demonstration of his rhetorical gifts.

Lesser known, at least to the general public, is the fact that Rustin was a lifelong student of the life and work of Gandhi who had a large hand in shaping King’s understanding of satyagraha and bringing nearly the entire arsenal of Gandhian ideas of mass nonviolent resistance to the fore in the struggle for civil and political rights. His most prominent biographer, John D’Emilio, says unhesitatingly that “more than anyone else, Rustin brought the message and methods of Gandhi to the United States.”

Rustin’s eyes were turned upon the anti-colonial struggle in India and he was firmly of the view that “no situation in America has created so much interest among negroes as the Gandhian proposals for India’s freedom.” King was but a schoolboy when Rustin had already established a reputation as a “one-man nonviolent army” working on behalf of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an international religious organisation that advocated radical pacifism and that in the US sought a distinctive and revolutionary approach to the race problem. He single-handedly sought to desegregate lunch counters in the Deep South and on a bus ride from Louisville to Nashville in 1942 moved to the section reserved, by both law and custom, for whites: when he refused to vacate his seat, the police were summoned and he was verbally abused and pummelled with blows....

https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/gandhi-player-infinite-games?fbclid=IwAR1nyEx4191ww33fTfxHJpxDj4yUXjvOub4xqNzrIc3v3NqUYpC1EyHL8vc

Bapu tujhko salaam

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Martin Luther King on Mahatma Gandhi: "My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence", September 1958

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