Sulabh Swachh Bharat - VOL: 2 | ISSUE 28

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Vrindavan Saga

Nikkei Response

Bibliophile’s delight

The Making of A Legend

She was restless and didn’t realise it was peace that she sought

Dr Pathak is God’s noblest and most precious gift to India

Libraries have been the prized possessions of historical societies

Schemes FOR YOUTHs AND EMPLOYMENT

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RNI No. DELENG/2016/71561

A Good News Weekly

Vol - 2 | Issue - 28 | June 25-July 01, 2018 | Price ` 5/-

impact factor

Books Shape Life, Life Shapes Books n Parsa ventakehwar rao Jr

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here are two very interesting and widely divergent examples of how reading a book has changed the thinking and life of two great people. The first is that of Mahatma Gandhi. He was influenced by American thinker Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” (published in 1849) and British writer and thinker John Ruskin’s “Unto This Last” (published in 1860). He read it on a train journey from Johannesburg to Durban. Gandhi was so impressed by Ruskin’s book that he paraphrased it in Gujarati and serialized it in the Indian Opinion, the newspaper he was running in South Africa. He later published this as a pamphlet under the title ‘Sarvodaya’. This is indeed the origin of the word ‘Sarvodaya’! The third writer who influenced Gandhi was Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. But it was not the novels of Tolstoy that impacted Gandhi. It was the Russian writer’s outpouring on the religious life that left an impression on him, especially Tolstoy’s “The Kingdom of God Is Within You”, which was translated into English from Russian by Constance Garnett in 1894, and also Tolstoy’s “Letter To A Hindu”. It is now generally recognised that Gandhi’s political experiment with ‘satyagraha’ owes much to Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and to Tolstoy’s idea of “passive resistance”. The other example is from the field of science. Erwin Schrodinger, an Austrian physicist, wrote a book called “What Is Life, The Physical

Books come as life-savers in every situation. A long journey, a sleepless night or a lazy day, a book can be your companion in every mood


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