Great in failure

V. S. Naipaul is right when he says that Mahatma Gandhi was a failure in South Africa. Gandhi admitted it when he called his autobiography, ...

V. S. Naipaul is right when he says that Mahatma Gandhi was a failure in South Africa. Gandhi admitted it when he called his autobiography, which dealt mostly with that period, only an 8220;experiment8221;. Gandhi was a failure later also; in the 1920s in Chauri Chaura, in the 1930s at the Round Table Conference, in the 1940s with the Quit India movement and, finally, with the carnage that followed the partition of India.

For that matter who has not been a failure? The Buddha has been a failure in India. Even when Asoka accepted his teachings, he did so after a life of murders. Having completed his imperial wars with the Kalinga War, he accepted Buddha8217;s Ahimsa, much as the five great powers had accepted nuclear non-proliferation, after they had acquired nuclear weapons.

Moses was proclaimed a failure by his God Himself, when God told him that he would not see the promised land himself.

Coming to more recent times, all the five leaders who won the Second World War were failures. FDR died before Japan was defeated. Churchill, who swore that he would not preside over the liquidation of the British empire, lived to see it happen. De Gaulle could not make France great again. The Algerian problem, which he thought he had solved, has come back to haunt Paris itself. Chiang Kaishek was replaced even in Taiwan. Stalin was declared a disaster by his own party, before it itself dissolved.

The test of greatness is not whether one has succeeded or failed, but the scale on which success or failure has been played out.

Even if all these men failed, they did so on a scale which makes us stare at them, even when we do not look up to them. We, even when we succeed, no one looks at us.

They fell off mountain peaks while the world gasped, we stumble on pebbles and we alone sigh. When you fail on this smaller scale, you get the Nobel Peace Prize. Gandhi is remembered even in his failures; who remembers the winners of the peace prize? If literature is meant to be read, the Nobel Prize for Literature is given to those who are not read.

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The small persons who read to relieve their daily boredom turn to Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse, who get no prize for the consolation they provide.

The dimension of true greatness is time, not contemporary judgement, whether by a Nobel jury or opinion polls. Even an achievement over space becomes great only if remembered over time, like the conquests of Alexander. Jesus was not known beyond Judea, but time itself is now counted by his name. The greatness of Gandhi is that he still has to be remembered, even if it be as a failure by some.