A Grenade on My Conscience: Gandhi Jayanti in a Violent World

October 2, 2026

The birthday of the prophet of nonviolence—the Gandhi Jayanti national holiday.

So ironical.

The Mahatma is almost a prophet now. His philosophy and principles are almost otherworldly, distant, unrelatable and impractical for this violent world. His talk seems suitable only for heaven, while we earthlings are busy fabricating our own multiple hells using violence, distrust, lies, deceit and mad competition in order to win at any cost.

So the great man looks distant like gods. His legacy vaporizing to rise to the dimensions of mythology and merge with the ancient greats. And when that happens, we earthlings just worship that great persona through statues. We garland the pictures and pay lip service through preachy talks.

Violence and wars have become the norm now.

The United Nations is practically defunct. The poor institution looks on helplessly as countries break all international norms of sovereignty and boundaries of their neighbouring states or even distant countries and launch wars.

The words of measured caution and disciplined arguments are obsolete. The heads of state now talk quite loosely, freely venting out their anger and hate like people on street corners.

As if American hegemony wasn't enough, now we have China as the new superpower aspirant. There will be lots of friction and sparks as their respective sharp edges graze past each other, bruising their egos. The smaller countries will become the cannon fodder for the two super bulls to score goals over each other in the international arena.

All in all, it’s a super-violent world.

Violence is sprouting in various forms—in the form of a crumbling ecosystem, poverty, the haves and have-nots, the unsurpassable chasm between beggars and the super-rich, civil wars, communal flares, genocides, land grabs, ranging from countries attacking each other to take away more chunks of land to oligarchs grabbing land in pristine forests and turning them into dead land after mining.

I think we are going to embed all this violence in the algorithms of artificial intelligence.

It is an unprecedentedly powerful tool, but its mechanical soul is driven by our poisoned mind. It has the potential to make a heaven for us. But for that, you need a sweet collective heart in the driving seat in the form of governance, collective responsibilities, responsible institutions, humane corporates prioritizing rules and regulations, checks and balances, systematic pause.

But that is impossible.

We are intrinsically made to use a resource as a tool or as a weapon to surpass others. And such a powerful tool like artificial intelligence will open the avenues for unprecedented harm to humans at many levels.

Let us see where this unprecedented capacity for violence takes us in the short, immediate future.

We can no longer talk of the medium future. So forget about the distant future.

Chronic uncertainty will lie or linger just weeks away now, or even days. Aeonic shifts in the shortest of times will put the stage on a very, very shaky platform where the characters, the plot, the theme will be vibrating with drastic uncertainty.

Drastic overhauls, stormy somersaults, blizzards of change in situations, views, opinions will become the norm. These bursts of massive shifts within no time will eat away the still remaining traces of stability and pause.

When change becomes so short-spanned, it will speed up the element of entropy to such an extent that human civilization will get heated up, running fast to a burnout.

Violence in digital form is a byproduct of violence in our minds.

I stand helplessly on this day when we celebrate the prophet of nonviolence.

As we pay lip service to him through a holiday and garlands to his statues, making speeches full of lies, every word a white lie, because those words are impractical in such a violently competitive world.

As I walk in my garden, I see the imprints of my own unconscious violence: the prints of a few hairy caterpillars that crawl at night and were squashed under my foot during my night walks, the pulp of a few slugs, the numerous ants I step on daily, the yellow mark of a broken egg on the bricked yard, dried but still visible—the mark of my version of putting things in order.

The trees had overgrown during the monsoon season, hardly leaving any sky visible in my small yard garden.

As I pruned branches, plop comes down the egg.

It fell like a grenade on my conscience.

A frozen moment.

A dove's egg, broken on the ground.

And there I stood, shell-shocked, with my pruner in my hand.

I felt like the harbinger of violence, so symbolic of what we humans are doing to other species on Earth.

The more we think we are putting our house in order, the more we are destroying the little homes and nests and habitation of other species.

The poor thing, the dove, can't even angrily shout like most other birds when either a human or a predatory bird destroys its nest.

It just coos, and even in agony, it sounds as if it is chuckling, because it's a laughing dove. We have named it a laughing dove on the basis of the notes the bird makes.

That is the irony of being human.

Whether we intend it or not, we end up being violent in one form or the other, and there doesn't seem to be a way out.

That makes it most ironical, a pinching irony, at least for a poetic heart, on the birth anniversary of the great man, the Mahatma, the prophet of nonviolence.

I stand helplessly looking around in all directions, trying to get some assurance that things will be peaceful, that it will no longer be a violent world.

But alas, there doesn't seem to be any clue.

Things look destined for a darker face.