Page:Gandhi - Young India, Viking Press, 1924-1926.pdf/738

712 The Poet does not, he is not expected, he has no need, to read Young India. All he knows about the movement is what he has picked up from table talk. He has therefore denounced what he has imagined to be the excesses of the Charkha cult.

He thinks for instance that I want everybody to spin the whole of his or her time to the exclusion of all other activity; that is to say that I want the Poet to forsake his muse, the farmer his plough, the lawyer his brief and the doctor his lancet. So far is this from truth that I have asked no one to abandon his calling, but on the contrary to adorn it by giving every day only thirty minutes to spinning as sacrifice for the whole nation. I have indeed asked the famishing to spin for a living and the half-starved farmer to spin during his leisure hours to supplement his slender resources. If the Poet spun half an hour daily his poetry would gain in richness. For it would then represent the poor man’s wants and woes in a more forcible manner than now.

The Poet thinks that the Charkha is calculated to bring about a deathlike sameness in the nation and thus imagining he would shim it if he could. The truth is that the Charkha is intended to realise the essential and living oneness of interest among India’s myriads. Behind the magnificent and kaleidoscopic variety, one discovers in nature a unity of purpose, design and form which is equally unmistakable. No two men are absolutely alike, not even twins, and yet there is much that is indispensable common to all mankind. And behind the commonness of form there is the same life pervading all. The idea of sameness or oneness was carried by Shankara to its utmost logical and natural limit and he exclaimed that there was only one Truth, one God-Brahman, and all form, nam rupa was illusion or illusory, evanescent. We need not debate whether what we see is unreal; and whether the real behind the unreality is what we do not see. Let both be equally real if you will. All I say is that there is a sameness, identity or oneness behind the multiplicity and variety. And so do I hold that behind a variety of occupations