I asked a bunch of NRI youngsters if they knew anything about Mahatma Gandhi. I did it over the birthday week as a sort of exercise in curiosity. I was told he was the dude who got shot, right, like John Lennon. I was informed with great panache by another aspiring bank executive that he is the father of the nation cause he told the Brits to get lost. This saga in awareness was further accentuated by the pithy remark that he said, “Hey Ram” when he got shot.

And a third member of this group said Richard Attenborough made a cool film and Gandhi was a tough guy who wouldn’t get off the train in South Africa because he sat in in a whites only compartment and they wanted to boot him out.

A young lady studying Mass Communication was not sure whether he died on October 2 or was born on that day but she said she had been invited to a classical dance festival at the Embassy but she couldn’t go because her friend was having a bridal shower.

One reasonably erudite man asked me if he wasn’t the person who stayed in jail like Mandela and used to write letters to his daughter. I told him that was Nehru and he said, yeah, right, but they were friends, so I am pretty close. Pretty close, Sir.

I was hoping somebody would mention non-violence, the inspiration he gave to Mandela and Martin Luther King, among so many others. Pretty close.

Maybe we don’t need to know. Maybe our youngsters have more important stuff to Google, Facebook to read or is it that we have made Gandhi unreal on this pedestal that today’s 24/7 generation hasn’t got the capacity to figure it out as they whizz down the fast track of the information highway?

I did not indict any of these people. Nor their parents. Nor their schools. Not even the authorities. We have all become derelict about the heroes of the past. We trot out Gandhi on the right day, knock off a few Bapu oriented rewrites from the library files and have made him so inaccessible as a human being that we are in danger of losing him entirely.

I didn’t even say anything rude to the lady who said Gandhi was at a play when he was shot. Prayer, play, Lincoln, Gandhi, same difference.