Martyrs Day tradition continues

CHENNAI:  At a time when, thanks to Anna Hazare, Gandhi and Gandhianism have been evoked liberally, the observance of the day the Father of the Nation was assassinated seemed muted, to say the least. While the usual motions were gone through, with senior government officials and educational institutions doing their bit, a number of functions organised to observe Martyr’s Day were cancelled at the last minute.Most of the functions stood cancelled either because the intended chief guest took a rain check or because the overall turnout was poor, owing to compulsions of a working day. “We had called for a prayer meeting to be followed by bhajans. But barely anyone turned up. So we cancelled the public event and held our own private bhajan session at a friend’s house,” said a Gandhian activist who didn’t want to be named.But even as civil society generally carried on, some private institutions remembered Gandhi. “We observed silence for two minutes at 11am, as is the custom. We were working in full swing till then, and we carried on afterwards. But we stopped for those two minutes,” said K Moorthy, who runs a trading company with around 50 employees in Thiruvanmiyur.“I don’t think we must ever give this up. The other days are all holidays and people are usually heaped in front of the TV. That means there is no time for any remembrance of the sacrifices made by not just Gandhi, but by lakhs of other people, as well. We don’t have the compassion to remember the sacrifices. So, Martyr’s Day is the only time we can still do it,” Moorthy added.Schools and colleges remained the bastions of will to remember Gandhi. A vast majority of schools stopped in their tracks and observed silence at 11am in memory of Gandhi. Some schools even had small lectures by their history teachers on the significance of the enforced silence. Government offices also continued with their meticulous tradition of stopping work to hold their silence in memory of the Father of the Nation.