Born: August 4, 1961, Hawaii, US
Died: Nobel Peace Prize (2009)
Keywords: President of US, Lawyer, Politician
Barack Hussein Obama II, the indomitably-spirited 44th President of the United States, speaks endearingly about Mahatma Gandhi as a "rare gift to mankind."
In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in December 2009, Obama ascribes his own life-story and his trajectory to the White House as being inspired by the life of Gandhi. And succinctly if gushingly, makes a tribute to India by saying:
"I am greatly influenced by a man from your Nation whose message of love and justice shows us the way ahead."
The fact that Obama displayed a picture of Gandhi on the walls of his Senate Office is further testimony to having been impacted by Gandhi's thoughts, especially in Gandhi's idea of forefronting through peaceful means, the principles of equality, justice, freedom, democracy.
Obama was also deeply aware that his mentor figure Martin Luther King drew his own inspiration from Gandhi's idea to "be the change that we seek". This was manifested in Luther King espousing Gandhi's non-violence and civil disobedience as ways of resistance to oppression, in this case, oppression with regard to the racial segregation that was experienced by Black Americans especially in the southern part of the United States.
The promise of non-violence as an instrument of protest had led Luther King in his own lifetime to repose his confidence in multi-racial living as a mantra for a new America. Sadly, this championing of peaceful, co-existence of Black with White Americans also got Martin Luther King him killed in the sixties.
The fact that Luther King drew deep wells of inspiration from Gandhi to address the idea of listening to marginalized voices, in this case the voice of Black America, itself deeply impacted young Obama in his growing up years.
Somewhere, through King's thoughts drawn from Gandhi, Obama had himself imbibed the idea that it is possible to see a David vs. Goliath ability of the marginalized "weak" to overthrow the perceived "strong" – in this case, India overthrowing the world's most powerful empire, that of the British.
