MAKE A DIARY ENTRY OF YOUR OWN REFLECTIONS ON MAHATMA GANDHI'S TRAIN INCIDENT
Answers
Answer:
“Well, we’re coming up to the station,” announces tour guide Shiney Bright to the people eagerly awaiting to disembark. It might be unique that a group of Indian travellers wants to see a railway station — of all places. But then, this is Pietermaritzburg.
The platforms of the station are empty — they aren’t expecting any trains anytime soon — but a trip there is bound to make any Indian traveller patriotic. It was at Pietermaritzburg station that a young lawyer named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was pushed out of a first-class compartment, thus prompting him to think about race and colour prejudices. This nondescript, not-so-busy station in South Africa is known worldwide today as the ‘Birthplace of Sathyagraha’.
The incidents leading up to Gandhi’s ouster from the train are well-detailed in the waiting room of the station, which is also the place where he spent the entire night mulling over prejudice and freedom. The story goes thus: a young Gandhi was travelling to Pretoria for a legal case on the cold night of June 7, 1893, when a white man objected to his presence in a first-class carriage. Gandhi, naturally, refused to move since he had a valid first-class ticket. The train had reached Pietermaritzburg by then, and Gandhi was unceremoniously thrown from his carriage onto the platform.
The waiting room where he spent the night is today peppered with posters and a computer kiosk presentation that recounts the incident in great detail. “It was winter, and winter in the higher regions of South Africa is severely cold. Maritzburg being at a high altitude, the cold was extremely bitter. My overcoat was in my luggage, but I did not dare to ask for it lest I should be insulted again, so I sat and shivered. I began to think of my duty. The hardship to which I was subjected was superficial, only a symptom of the deep disease of colour prejudice,” Gandhi writes about that night.
It was a long night for Gandhi, one that would make him think about the situation back in India and mull over what he could do about it.
“I was born in India but was made in South Africa,” commented Gandhi once. It has been 125 years since that night, but the statue and the waiting room in Pietermaritzburg leave Indians teary-eyed to this day.
Answer:
I (Gandhi) was at the train station waiting for the train. Then the train arrived then I went to first class because booked a ticket for it. Then after some time the conductor came to me and asked why I am sitting in the first class.
Then I showed my ticket to him, but he still disagreed with it. Then I calmly said that I bought a ticket to be in first class, so I am allowed here. Then he said to me that if I didn’t go back to the third-class coach then he would throw me off the next station. But I still calmly sat in my seat in the first class, so he threw me off the next station and it was the worst day I have ever seen in my Life.
Explanation:
I think this situation is what Gandhi really worried about and its DISCRIMINATION.