Video Text Transcript:
Hello and welcome to this new video from the Life-changing Books (“Des Livres Pour Changer de Vie”) blog. As you can see, I am at the base of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and it made me want to tell you about a book. This book is Gandhi’s autobiography entitled “An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth”.
What is the relationship between Gandhi and the Eiffel Tower?
Quite simply, at the beginning of this book, Gandhi explains that he had the opportunity to visit the Eiffel Tower during its opening ceremony in 1889. There you have it, the link between Gandhi and the Eiffel Tower. This is a fact that is rather unknown.
I am talking about this book because Gandhi was one of the outstanding figures of the 20th century. He had a huge influence on the history of India, its independence and also on the history of the twentieth century.
As Gandhi explains, from 1923-24 he really became a public figure and everything he did has been documented. But the whole period before, he was not known, which is why he insisted on writing the story of his life up to that time.
We follow Gandhi from his birth in India, until that time and we see an incredible, extraordinary character gradually develop from within.
We can see how he was led to stand up for the less unfortunate, how he was led to commit to the independence of India, and we can see that this was not done in a day; he had to go through many stages.
One of the values he lives by the most is truth, which is the basis of honesty and integrity. It’s really impressive to see how much his whole life revolves around this value, to the point where he sometimes makes decisions that may seem absurd to us.
This is also one of the qualities of this book; we see a character develop from within. We can see that he is definitely human; he is by no means perfect.
In addition, it enables us Westerners to immerse ourselves in Indian culture. He is at the same time an exceptional character; but who is very rooted in his culture; and we can see the difference between Indian culture and ours. It is really very different and very informative.
This book is a bit thick; you won’t read it in two hours, but personally I find it fascinating. I find that it inspires us to live better lives, to bring more valuable benefits to the world. I highly recommend it to you, Gandhi, “An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth”.
Thanks for watching this video, and see you soon for more adventures.