Gandhi or Gorbachev?
by J.V. Yakhmi
One day in January 1990, an intense debate unfolded at lunch-table at the University of Toronto as to who should be the most popular human being of the 20th century. I was a visiting professor in the Physics Department there, and as per tradition, all the professors of the Department would gather just before lunch and move over to one of the many ethnic restaurants nearby, or to a university cafeteria located at the Hart House, for a relaxed lunch. On most occasions, the topic of discussion at the lunch-table would be the current world scene — in science, in politics, or even a hot local issue.
Several things had happened in the Eastern Bloc just a few months before, viz. the communist rulers of Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, were displaced in 1989; a democratic set-up was ushered in Romania after the execution of its leader Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife in 1989; and the Berlin Wall was demolished in November 1989;
Mr. Mikhail Gorbachev, the then general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, and President of the Soviet Union (USSR) was a hero those days for the western press, especially during the bilateral summits between the Presidents of the United States and USSR, held at regular intervals at different locations like Reykjavik, etc. The two words used often by Gorbachev, glasnost (transparency) and perestroika (restructuring), had become the buzzwords. His efforts brought the end of the cold war in sight, and the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, to himself.
No wonder, therefore, that on a day in January 1990, Prof. Allan Jacob, our colleague in the Physics Department at University of Toronto initiated a discussion at lunch-table about who should be the man of the 20th century. Merits of many popular personalities were debated. Someone mentioned Einstein, for what he did to influence the science in the 20th century. Someone mentioned Hitler. I and two other colleagues felt it should be Mahatma Gandhi, who contributed so much to the peace process through non-violent means, a concept that remained relevant even after his assassination in 1948. But, a majority of the professors present on the lunch-table felt strongly that Gorbachev deserved to be the man of the century, due to his pragmatic policies which brought the end of the cold war in sight and a hope of democracy to the communist countries. However, a choice between Gandhi and Gorbachev had to wait because there were still 9–10 years to go before the turn of the century.
Two years later, I was once again visiting the same department in Toronto and I deliberately raised the topic at lunch-table, once again. By then Gorbachev’s magic had withered, the Eastern Bloc lay dismembered with USSR divided into Russia and a few smaller countries, and Boris Yeltsin was in the saddle in Russia. Therefore, the choice during our discussion in 1992 for the man of the century was unanimous — it was Gandhi! Of course, there were still eight years left for the 20th century to end.
