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6 50 55 60 Razi Ahmad, secretary of Gandhi Sangrahalaya, a research centre in Patna, said, “We are of the view that any attempt to tarnish the image of national heroes should not be permitted.” In truth, the film reveals Gandhi’s humanity and that, says [great-grandson] Tushar Gandhi, should have been exposed a long time ago. “Gandhi has become a hostage to his mahatmaship. It is easy to say that we cannot emulate someone like him when we put him on a pedestal. What we should be doing is seeing him as a normal, frail human being who strove to achieve something. We should emulate people like him, but not worship them.” (Sarfraz Manzoor, The Guardian , 10 August 2007) c) Sum up the information from the text in your own words. d) Browse through the text again and search for pieces of information which clearly show the conflicted father-son relationship. Reading: Salman Rushdie on Gandhi Read the text about Gandhi. Some parts are missing. Choose the correct part (A–L) for each gap (1–9). There are two extra parts that you should not use. Write your answers in the boxes provided. The first one (0) has been done for you. 3  VIP file Salman Rushdie (* 1947 in Mumbai) is an acclaimed British-Indian novelist and essayist. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), resulted in violent protests in the Muslim world and brought the author – a Muslim himself – death threats. V A thin Indian man with not much hair sits alone on a bare floor, wearing nothing but a loincloth and a pair of cheap spectacles, …  0  . The black-and-white photograph takes up a full page in the newspaper. In the top left-hand corner of the page, in full colour, is a small rainbow-striped apple. Below this, there’s a slangy American injunction to “Think Different”. Such is the present-day power of international Big Business. Even the greatest of the dead may summarily be drafted into its image ad campaigns. Once, a half-century ago, …  1  . But that, as they say, is history. Now Gandhi is modelling for Apple. His thoughts don’t really count in this new incarnation. What counts is that he is considered to be “on message,” …  2  . The advertisement is odd enough to be worth dissecting a little. Obviously it is rich in unintentional comedy. M. K. Gandhi, as the photograph itself demonstrates, was a passionate opponent of modernity and technology, preferring the pencil to the typewriter, the loincloth to the business suit, the ploughed field to the belching manufactory. Had the word processor been invented in his lifetime, …  3  . The very term word processor is unlikely to have found favour. […] Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract, ahistorical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a freeloading concept, …  4  , an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth. Richard Attenborough’s much-Oscared movie Gandhi struck me, when it was first released, as an example of this type of unhistorical Western saint-making. …  5  , promoting that fashionable product, the Wisdom of the East; and Gandhi- as-Christ, dying (and, before that, frequently going on hunger strike) so that others might live. His philosophy of nonviolence seemed to work by embarrassing the British into leaving; freedom could be won, the film appeared to suggest, …  6  , whose moral code could then oblige him to withdraw. […] He was determined to live his life as an ascetic, but, as the poet Sarojini Naidu joked, it cost the nation a fortune to keep Gandhi living in poverty. His entire philosophy privileged the village way over that of the city, yet he was always financially dependent on the support of industrial billionaires like Birla. …  7  , but he also once went on a hunger strike to force one of his capitalist patrons’ employees to break their strike against the harsh conditions of employment. […] Forever scarred by the knowledge that, as a 16-year-old youth, he’d been making love to his wife Kasturba at the moment of his father’s death, …  8  but went on into his old age with what he called his “brahmacharya experiments,” during which naked young women would be asked to lie with him all night so that he could prove that he had mastered his physical urges. (He believed that total control over his “vital fluids” would enhance his spiritual powers.) […] 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 88 India Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigen um des Verlags öbv