>>> Mani Bhavan Gamdevi

I have heard that children cannot be taught history until the age of seven as they are unable to grasp the concept of the past. And I got to learn this first-hand when I took my kids to Mani Bhavan. I had been to Mani Bhavan many times. But my earlier visits were to refer to books or for other academic purposes.

It was from Mani Bhavan that Mahatma Gandhi initiated Satyagraha against the Rowlatt Act and propagated the causes of Swadeshi, Khadi and Hindu-Muslim unity.

In 1955, the building was dedicated as a memorial to Gandhi and to the important activities of great significance that he initiated from this place. This is the one place foreigners love to visit when they stop by the city. To think, we have a museum of this kind in a city that hardly a miniscule percentage visit, is hard to explain.

For Vani and Ammol, my kids, Mani Bhavan was astounding. Gandhi, to them, was as remote as mythological characters like Ram or Hanuman; the freedom struggle was alien and abstract. Pointing to a frame of a seven-year-old Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, I told Ammol, a seven-year-old himself, that this is how Gandhi looked at his age. We also checked out the tableaux which highlighted important events in Gandhi’s life.