[nukkad] Insight India 13

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Hello everybody,
This time I am writing about a person so extra ordinary in his wide ranging
abilities and character,  which made him so much outstanding and so much
unique.  His name was Srimad Rajchandra Zaveri, who was a business man based
at Bombay dealing in diamonds and pearls. He was the person who most
influenced Mahatma Gandhi`s toughts and action. On Gandhi`s own admission in
his autobiography, Rajchandra stands ahead of Tolstoy and Ruskin who
influenced him the most. It was Rajchandra who imbibed into Gandhi the
reading habit which stayed with the latter till his last day. During
Gandhi`s tough days in London while studying law, Rajchandra always kept him
in good mental state by continuously coorresponding with him and igniting in
him a passion for wide reading and nursing him with the ideas of secular
beliefs in life. This gave little boy Mohandas tremendous inner courage to
survive his difficulties and a strong resolution to return to India only
after completing his Bar at Law. The constant moral push Rajchandra provided
inculcated in Gandhi a virtue to face challanges of life in their stride
with whole heart and happiness.  After a long and tiring voyage back to
Bombay, Gandhi could not contain himself and without taking rest, rushed to
meet Rajchandra the same evening. In their upbringing there was nothing in
common. Rajchandra was rich, cultivated, intensely practical, wholly
immersed in Hindu faith, never plagued by doubts, his mind moving with
startling clarity. Although by profession a jeweler, he was equally well
known as poet and as a SHATAVADHANI, one who could attend to a hundred
(shata) affairs simultaneously. Though there may be a slight element of
exaggeration, there was not the least doubt that he possessed phenomenal
powers of concentration, and he could simulteneously play a game of chess,
solve a complicated mathematical problem, discourse on any subject given to
him, read from a book, and yet play a musical instrument,  and make a move
on the chess board and conclude intricate finance details of a deal
involving liakhs of rupees, all at one time ! On an occasion he had given
public demonstration of these powers and had been invited to tour Europe as
a man with stupendous memory. Gandhiji put him to the test by reciting all
the unfamiliar French and Latin words he could remember, and Rajchandra
immediately recited the long list of words in the correct order. He combined
an astonishing intellectual daring with an encyclopedic knowledge of Indian
religions and moral earnestness. He was continually asking moral questions
and searching out final answers. He read all the religious books of all the
faiths and he was the first to suggest  to Gandhi that no religion was
superior to another, for all religions were concerned to bring the
worshipper into the presence of God. Rajchandra was perfectly serious when
he said that the only proper and worthy object of man`s desire was that he
should find himself in the presence of God. Anything less than this was
unworthy of human attainment. While at business, vast sums of money passed
through his hands, he kept his account books in good order, he attended to
the affairs of his business with the regularity of clockwork and on his
desk, beside the magnifying glasses and the jeweler`s scales, he kept a
small notebook in which he wrote down his thoughts day by day. He was
happily married, rich, eloquent and enviable and what was most to be envied
in him was his spiritual power.  Once during a spiritual discussion
Rajchandra had delivered himself of an opinion which deeply influenced
Gandhi. He had said that it was not enough to be a paragon of virtue, it was
necessary to bring all men to virtue. It was a puritanical philosophy, but
Gandhi found a compelling beauty in it. Of all the men, Gandhi had met and
dealt with in his life, he regarded only Rajchandra and Gokhale as his
intellectual equals, capable of crossing swords with him. Many years later
in his autobiography Gandhi wrote :
" In my moments of spiritual crisis he was my refuge. "
He died at a young age of 33. Curiously many a genius in India have died at
this tender age, among whom are the likes of Adi Shankaracharya,
Vivekananda, Shailendra.
Rohit Zaveri, Dubai.




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