A personal note. I’m about to jump in my car and will be offline most of the next 7 hours except for a brief check in at Starbucks. The events now unfolding in Egypt are highly dramatic but also an example of watching history truly unfold. As we watch the protests and seeming escalation of clashes, it’s notable that this week was a sad anniversary for history buffs or those of us who studied or lived in India: it’s the anniversary of the assassination of one of history’s originals, Mahatma Gandhi, who inspired Martin Luther King, Jr. Lest we forget, READ THIS.
UPDATE: As way of background. I love India. I studied it while a student at Colgate University and spent my last semester senior year working as an intern on the Hindustan Times in New Delhi. After getting my masters at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, I returned there as a freelance and was the “Special Correspondent” stringer for the Chicago Daily News, writing features, breaking news, analysis columns and longform articles (the byline was “Daily News Foreign Service”) from India and Bangladesh. While in Delhi in 1973 I met a young up and coming journalist named Swaraaj Chauhan who became a good friend and years later would re-find me on the internet. I invited him to co-blog on TMV. While in Delhi I stayed with Indian friends and their kids stayed with my parents in Connecticut (one even totaled my mother’s car). And while in India, I carried a bio of Mahatma Gandhi as well as a book with his writings.
Gandhi doesn’t define modern India and didn’t in the 70s. But he is part of its history and culture — and helped shape events in the United States in the 60s. And his assassination was a harbinger of some of the shocking assassinations America would suffer in the turbulent 60s.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.