Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on Oct. 2, 1869. By the time he was assassinated in 1948, he had successfully overcame an empire he considered to be the best civilization, invented a weapon of civil revolution and empowered a nation of a billion people to build their own future. Moreover, he had experimented and explored the depths of truth like never before.

His was the philosophy of Swaraj — self-rule. Personified by a billion people, it became an independence movement. Acted out as a personal ritual, it became the symbol of a frail old man with piercing glasses, walking fast with a stick. Swaraj is the idea of total control of one’s decision-making capacities. One embodies all forms of a body — human and civic. Total control means freedom from external influences and being driven by one’s moral directives.

Let me first explain the civic context of the term. This particular term — total control — has eluded men for more than a century now. A whole nation failed to grasp the term in its entirety. India now grapples with urban goals for a rural population.

Gandhi’s stance against the Industrial Revolution and the materialistic benefits it brought with it is often misunderstood to be that of an old man arguing against change. No other misunderstanding can personify ignorance this well. His fight was never against machines but the lack of resilience of mankind against them. The enslavement of humans by materialistic needs does not call for living a minimalist life. Rather it means to not allow the latter to override the moral directives of the former which were formed before the existence of the latter and hence are independent of it.

Allow me to cite Gandhi’s thoughts about railways as an example. Gandhi saw distance as a paradox. Before the invention of the railways, people had to walk by foot or ride on horses to distant places. The time it took to scale distances allowed Gandhi to learn the culture and the languages along his path.

The interactions with native people on his travels shaped his thoughts. It allowed the traveler to reach his destination, not as an outsider without context of the land but as a newborn child who is beginning to blend in the new world in front of his eyes, slowly but surely. This primes a person to imbibe a global personality in its true sense.

This, in the Indian context, was most relevant as every few hundred miles brought a different culture. The railways killed the sense of time that distance forced upon people. The spontaneity of the physical transition robbed the mental faculties of the transition time they required to respect the beliefs and traditions of the destination land. This lack of respect leads to eventual invasion which, incidentally, is also catalyzed by machines. Gandhi was not against railways — he feared the railways might expose people’s lack of respect for anything that was different from their own beliefs.

Sociologist Shiv Visvanathan recently remarked, Gandhi made a debate club out of the Indian independence struggle. The Indian Congress, at the beginning of the 20th century, was divided into extremists and conservationists. Extremists believed force and violence, if necessary, must be used to gain independence. The conservationists, on the other hand, believed violence would self-destruct a country of a billion people.

Gandhi, championing the conservationists, believed if independence was reduced to a goal of driving out the British, it would lead to the wealthy taking their place while the rural majority population remained enslaved. His articles, editorials, letters and comments to fellow revolutionaries showcased a philosopher at work.

Gandhi, through his understanding of Swaraj, invented the satyagraha. The word Satyagraha is a conjunction of two words — satya, meaning truth and agraha, meaning insistence. Satyagraha, in its true form, means to insist, relentlessly and at all costs, about what one believed to be true. It is independent of the oppressor and does not involve harming the oppressor in a direct fashion. The oppressor depends on the oppressed and not vice versa. His experiences in London as a lawyer and debates with English political philosophers gave him an unparalleled understanding of the British governance. He realized the dependence of the British on the Indian population for trade and gold. The Satyagraha movement saw millions of Indians on the streets standing still in non-cooperation — doing nothing. If the worker class, the greater majority, hundreds of millions in number, refused to work, there would be no trade, no gold for the British to loot. Governing a nation of a billion people that produced nothing is a lousy investment for an empire involved in world wars. Gandhi hit hard where it hurt, all by the simple act of non-cooperation.

Gandhi was an impossible man, in all senses of the word. His life was a relentless pursuit of satya. He made his wife, Kasturba, and his son, Harilal, live a torturous life. His chase for self-improvement and constant struggle to live a life personifying the ideals he strived for in a nation often brought him in conflict with his responsibilities as a husband and as a father. He chose to honor the former.

Today, Gandhi is shrouded in banality. He is the father of a nation of a billion people, a handful of whom remember him for the man he was or the life he lived. Ironically, his face is embalmed on the Indian currency notes, the notes which enslave the very civic body he tried to keep free from slavery of all kinds.

Gandhi never denied the fact that his thoughts were hardly his own. He merely stood on the shoulders of great men before him such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Gandhi was a sociologist.

Gandhi was a researcher. Gandhi was an engineer. He understood the requirements, modeled solutions and acted upon them with immaculate precision and relentless perseverance.

Most of all, Gandhi was an experimenter. His life was one big social experiment. Maybe it is time that India, Gandhi’s own land, experiment with its development model as Gandhi experimented with its revolution model. Then, in its true sense, Gandhi would become the “Father of the nation.”