Mark Twain once said ~ “Humour is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our harnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.” Indeed, humour is one of the most important things in our everyday life. A good hearty laugh relieves physical tension and stress, leaving muscles relaxed for up to 45 minutes after. It is regarded as life’s essential spice, and serves as a profound source of joy and relief. Every human has an innate sense of humour.
Time magazine named Albert Einstein as its Man of the 20th century and Mahatma Gandhi as joint runner-up with Franklin D Roosevelt. Einstein was widely recognised not only as an exceptionally brilliant scientist but, according to Nobel physics laureate Werner Heisenberg, he had also a great sense of humour. Einstein had a genetic condition that made his hair look untamed, which has been documented in his photos in his lifetime. He was once scheduled to deliver a speech at Princeton on General Relativity. He started his speech with the sentence: “I suppose you think that if I know so much about gravity, why can’t I get my hair to lie down?” Another time during a lecture, he had written a number of equations on the blackboard.
A graduate student, with much hesitation, pointed out to Einstein that there might be a mistake in the equation. Einstein looked at that equation, rubbed his jaw for a second and said, “You are absolutely right. Oh well I’m no Einstein.” Once an American journalist asked the Mahatma, “Mr. Gandhi, do you have a sense of humour?” He looked at him for a while and replied, “If I had no sense of hu – mour I would have committed suicide a long time ago!” In fact, he was funny and was fond of wordplay and witticisms. One never had a dull moment with him. With children he joked like a child, with young people, he was a young man, with old people he was old, and with politicians he laughed and joked about politics. In all his jokes, there was an undercurrent of seriousness; he never said anything that he did not mean, and not a word escaped his lips that he termed frivolous. These qualities helped Gandhiji withstand the rigours of fighting for civil rights in South Africa and the arduous journey of the country’s freedom struggle.
When a repoter once asked him, “Why do you always choose to travel by third class in a train?”, he is said to have replied, “Simply, because there is no fourth class as yet”. There are several instances of his sense of humour which always chered others without hurting their feelings. In 1931, Gandhiji visited King George V at Buckingham Palace. He wore a loincloth, sandals, a shawl and his famous dangling watch.
A journalist asked snidely, “Mr. Gandhi, do you think you are properly dressed to meet the king?”. He responded: “Do not worry about my clothes. His majesty has enough clothes for both of us!” When a year later, Winston Churchill called him a ‘half-naked fakir’, the Father of the Nation thanked him for the ‘compliment’ and wrote that he “would love to be a fakir but was yet to be one.” Both the jokes had an underlying political meaning and revealed the unequal power relation between Gandhi (representing India) and the King and Churchill (both representing Great Britain). During his stay in London, the famous actor Charlie Chaplin called on Gandhiji and was surprised that the Mahatma had never heard of him. However, for the next half an hour, it was the Mahatma that kept the comedian laughing.
In Lancashire, he met a worker and asked him: “How many children do you have?” The reply was, “Eight Sir ~ four sons and four daughters.” The Mahatma said: “I have four sons. I can race with you halfway!” And there was a burst of laughter all around. In March 1937, the Mahatma was on his way to Madras for attending the session of the All India Hindi Sahitya Sammelan over which the late Seth Jamnalal Bajaj was to preside. The Grand Trunk Express by which he travelled reached Bezwada in the morning. As usual, there was a great rush at the station for the Mahatma’s Darshan. At that time, the question whether the Congress would accept office in the provinces occupied the minds of the people in the country.
One correspondent somehow appeared before the Mahatma and asked the Mahatma abruptly: “Bapuji, will the Congress accept office?” Gan dhiji cleverly dodged the press correspondent. But finding him un yielding, Gandhiji, with a chuckle of gentle humour, asked, “Why are you so anxious about this matter? Do you want to be a minister?” The whole crowd burst into laughter, and the correspondent had no option but to recede into the background. In 1942, Louis Fischer, the well-known American journalist, had to travel from Wardha railway station in a rickety tonga to meet the Mahatma at Sevagram. As soon as he entered the kutir, Gandhi sensed his discomfort and smilingly remarked, “Well, you must have travelled from the railway station in an airconditioned coach!” Fischer was able to laugh at his discomfort.
One day an Italian Bishop visited Sevagram to take a photograph of the Mahatma when he was sitting in a corner of his cottage with a mud-pack on his shaven head to beat the intense summer heat. Gandhiji greeted him with a smile and said, “Why waste your film, Father? People will ask you whether Gandhiji had broken his skull?” Gandhiji practised his wisecracks, even when he was ill. Once, in reply to an anxious enquiry about his health, he wrote: “Though the doctors say that the blood pressure is high, I notice no effects of it. And three doctors and three instruments gave three different readings yesterday: 200, 180, 160? What is to do when doctors differ?” About his doctor friend who had lost his teeth, he wrote: “What a shame that a doctor became toothless as I am!” Once he joked about his material possessions and who would inherit these.
Jawaharlal Nehru was named as his successor. Prafulla Chandra Ghosh and others joked with him. Gandhiji’s reply: “What will he inherit? My stick and my watch.” Meetings between Gandhiji and Rajaji used to be a feast of wit, wisdom and good humour. On a saltless diet, Gandhiji once said that he had lived without salt for years in South Africa and expressed his willingness to consider salt-free diets as a rule. Rajaji quipped, “When people are made to go without salt in their diet, they are likely to take to licking walls and eating clay like children to satisfy their natural carving for salt.” To this Gandhiji replied, “It will do them good, the walls will be cleaner.”
Examples of the Mahatma’s humour are legion. His simple language, his prolific writings, his meetings enriched with music and prayer, his spinning wheel, his costume ~ all are unique. Along with these, his toothless smile was one of his most famous physical characteristics. His sense of humour always reflected his intense humanity and his freedom from complexes. His lively humour and capacity to smile was as striking as his advocacy of non-violence. His American friend John Haynes Holmes observed, “Laughter was the doorway to his soul.” George Bernard Shaw called him “the only man in the East with a sense of humour”.
Source: The Statesman, JAYDEV JANA | New Delhi | October 2, 2024 8:25 am
