Revolutionary book that inspired Gandhi turns 150 FEATURE 01/04/2011

Revolutionary book that inspired Gandhi turns 150

FEATURE

01/04/2011
WASHINGTON — It was 150 years ago that the book Unto This Last was published, a groundbreaking work that turned economic thinking on its head and profoundly influenced the views of many including Mahatma Gandhi, the father of Indian independence.
Gandhi first read the subversive masterwork of political economy by John Ruskin in 1904, during a train trip in South Africa where he was living at the time.

“The book was impossible to lay aside, once I had begun it,” wrote the progenitor of the non-violence resistance movement years later in his autobiography.

“It gripped me. Johannesburg to Durban was a 24-four hours’ journey. The train reached there in the evening. I could not get any sleep that night. I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book,” Gandhi wrote..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110104com3.html