"In a gentle way, you can shake the world"

So ... it's been a while. I got called to be our church branch's Primary president, and I've spent the last two weeks trying to wrap my head around that. If anyone has advice on how best to handle a small, multilingual, multicultural Primary with not enough adult help, I'm all ears.

But back to Delhi! Our second full day was devoted to Gandhi -- and to the Delhi train station, but that's a whole post on its own.

First we visited Gandhi Smriti, where Gandhi spent his last 144 days and then was assassinated. The home has been turned into a fantastic museum, with displays about his life and works on the ground level and a bunch of cool interactive exhibits upstairs.

One of the rooms had small dioramas depicting scenes from Gandhi's life. Johnny's been learning about Indian history at school and was pretty excited to point out the Salt March and a scene showing Gandhi being thrown off a whites-only train during his time in South Africa. The kids acted out those scenes during a Gandhi Jayanti assembly at school.

My favorite part of the museum was the part of the house where Gandhi had been living. There are two rooms set up exactly the way they were when he lived there. One is a bedroom, and the other is his receiving area. Both are very simple.

This is the receiving room. To the left of the mattress is his small spinning wheel.

Bedroom ... just a bed

A display case shows some of his possessions, including one of two watches that are stopped at the time of his death and said to be his. The other watch is in another museum in Delhi, and no one really knows which was actually his.

This instrument is one of the interactive displays upstairs. The displays were all really interesting, but I probably would have enjoyed the experience more if we hadn't had a guide showing off all the bells and whistles. She had a hard time letting us just sit and watch the films or read the information. There was a great kids room, though.

weird Indian version of a marimba

There are footsteps leading from Gandhi's bedroom to the rear of the compound, where Gandhi walked on the evening of January 30, 1948, to address the crowd at a prayer meeting. He hadn't quite reached the platform where he was supposed to speak when a Hindu extremist ran forward and shot him.

There's a small monument at the exact spot of the assassination. Caroline mentioned that she always gets a strange feeling when she's standing at the very spot where something tragic occurred. I do, too. I suppose I feel a little too close. Daily life makes it easy to push away the tragic or the profound things of the world, but sometimes they smack you in the face. India is full of places, people and things that make it impossible to ignore the world around you.

There's a huge mural showing scenes from Gandhi's life across the garden from the monument.

Gandhi is associated with khadi, which is the spinning of yarn and weaving of fabrics for self-sufficiency. He asked his wife to teach him to spin and weave, and he practiced it every day for much of his later life. Spinning and weaving became symbols of India's independence movement, because the return to traditional textiles allowed for boycotting British cloth. At Gandhi Smriti there are demonstrations of spinning, winding, weaving, and sewing.

Caroline said watching this guy made her appreciate her sewing machine's bobbin winder. :) That bright orange color is used to make the clothing worn by some Hindu priests and pilgrims.

After a quick stop at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in somewhere, Delhi, (the food was delicious ... and the kids had dal makhani, of course) we went on to Raj Ghat, where Gandhi was cremated. We had been told that this would be a peaceful, even spiritual experience. Well ... here's what we encountered.

There were THOUSANDS of people at Raj Ghat ... and 99 percent of them were school kids. Peaceful? No. Spiritual? Well, there were moments, I suppose.

As usual, our kids were mobbed by admiring, camera-toting crowds. I turned the camera on one group.

at least they're friendly!

Despite the crowds, Raj Ghat really did have a solemn feel once we had removed our shoes and walked into the memorial. There's an eternal flame at the site, and workers keep incense burning in front of the platform.

This day left me resolved to learn more about Gandhi. I titled this post "In a gentle way, you can shake the world," a famous quotation of Gandhi's, because I couldn't help wondering at the influence this one man had over the fate of his own people and of people around the world. It's pretty inspiring.