Gandhi from WhatsApp     

Has the Mahatma been ‘WhatsAppified’? Yes, says Ayush Chaturvedi, the class X student who electrified social media with his extempore speech at the school assembly. The Telegraph reported the impact of the video under the headline, “Boy who said what many men won’t”.

At a time when the Mahatma is routinely maligned by politicians and when temples and portraits of his assassin and his ideological mentors are being installed in Parliament, Chaturvedi’s speech stood out. It took minutes to kill Gandhi, he said, but it took years of struggle to make him the Mahatma. The school student calmly declared that he stood by Gandhi and his ideals.

What was even more impressive was that his address was impressive enough for his teachers to video record it, beginning a few minutes into the speech. The student, clearly more mature than his years, is not on social media and it was his mother who shared the video on her Facebook page.

It was shared 1.5 million times since September 10. Inspired by his father, a social worker, Ayush has read Gandhi’s Experiments with Truth and Hind Swaraj besides Dr Kumarappa’s Gandhi’s Arth Vichar in Hindi. His generation, Ayush says, learns about Gandhi from WhatsApp and Facebook and not many youngsters choose to move beyond the Internet and read books.