Saw Lage Raho Munnabhai recently. Wasnt too sure whether it will do justice to Gandhiji but Tushar Gandhi, great-grandson of the Mahatma, reassured me.
And of course, many were surprised that I, a self-professed Gandhi fan, hadnt seen it.
To keep my reputation intact, I marched into the multiplex (do they have any single screens left?!) with a dupatta and a muffler tightly drawn over my head (I had a huge cold and was on sick leave). As it turned out, the AC was smartly turned off midway and I was soon sweating.
The movie was sweet, of course, with not one politically incorrect word or glance. It was nice to see someone resurrecting Gandhiji in this manner, and the effect the movie had on people.
One small quibble.. it did not bring out the import of Gandhiji's superhuman persona, which is fine. But, on the contrary, it made him look a trifle sorry at least in one scene in which Sanjay Dutt shows the other cheek to the assaulter. Here, a casual reference to the fact that Gandhiji did not only believe in getting beaten up all the time would have helped. All his life, he protested violence. But he believed that violence is better than non-violence if someone is turning to non-violence out of fear of the opponent. As far as he was concerned, cowardice was a worse vice. And, I may be wrong, but this scene left me with the feeling that Gandhiji was preaching cowardice.
I am amazed at what this movie is doing to people. There are quizzes on the Mahatma, Gandhigiri problem-solving and so on. What I find ironic is that when the media needed to know whether the movie does justice to Gandhiji, it turned to his immediate family-- Tushar Gandhi and his aunts, etc. And to think, Gandhiji hardly got any time for his immediate family, caught up as he was in tending to his country-wide brethren. For a man who considered his family as just any other Indian family, it's a sad comment on how we have treated him by deciding that his legacy is limited to his family alone. Why on earth is he called Father of the Nation?
P.S. To me, Gandhiji's family is the real Gandhi family-- the first family of India but we choose to bequeath that title to the Nehrus who for reasons unknown (or probably well known) decided to adopt the surname, `Gandhi'.

I have been reading a biography of Albert Einstein, one of my favourites along with Isaac Newton since my childhood. Even he had to pay the price for being a Jew in pre-Nazi Germany and could therefore appreciate the virtue of non-violence and Gandhiji.
One of Einstein's comments that gripped me as a kid has been about his own relativity. He would stroll down the beach and often wonder at the universe (or space?) before him, and ponder over his own insignificance in the larger scheme of things. Like a speck of sand on the beach, he said.
If a genius of his order thinks this way, what are we? It is this humility that makes Gandhiji and him just so admirable.