Mahatma Gandhi was killed in January 1948. British literary giant George Orwell wrote an altogether brilliant essay — an obituary-style assessment — titled Reflections on Gandhi in January 1949. Orwell died in January 1950.

The two years between those three Januarys saw a post-Partition India lose territory and population but gain a great Constitution that proclaimed it a Republic. A post-World War II Britain shrank dramatically as an empire but through the landmark London Declaration of 1949, became renewed as the Commonwealth of Nations. And the world as a whole, chastened by its searing experiences of the Holocaust and of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, came to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the UN.

In his 1949 essay, Orwell wrote about the impact of Gandhi on the war-scorched world and asked, “…[T]he question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another?” And Orwell answered his own question like this: “These and kindred questions need discussion, and need it urgently, in the few years left to us before somebody presses the button and the rockets begin to fly. It seems doubtful whether civilisation can stand another major war, and it is at least thinkable that the way out lies through non-violence.”

To use two unlovely contemporary expressions that evoke laptops and fast-food joints, the keywords and takeaways from these lines of Orwell’s are “before somebody presses the button”, “rockets fly”, and “way out is non-violence”.

Orwell was not one to be found........

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