In Bollywood, it was Sanjay Dutt, who first portrayed an eccentric obsession for the Mahatma in the eponymously titled film Lage Raho Munna Bhai. Having spent a night poring over dust-laden literature related to Mohandas K Gandhi inside a library, Munna Bhai starts having hallucinatory visions of the leader.

It's this vision that later guides the goon to the path of truth, integrity, and what film-maker Rajkumar Hirani wittingly made us remember as Gandhigiri. Historian and scholar Ramachandra Guha, who has just released an 1,100-page biography, Gandhi: The Years That Changed India 1914-1948 (Penguin/Allen Lane), and has spent over three decades researching him, may have never succumbed to this glorified reverence to Gandhi, but he still admits to being a "great admirer of the man."