President Obama & the Ghost of Mahatma Gandhi

   As I write, President Obama is in India. Sunday's November 7^th New York Times headlines: "A Gandhi Fan, Obama Faces A New India."

   I also am a "Gandhi fan."

   When preparing my first trip to India in 1956 at the invitation of Nataraja Guru of Bangalore, following my declaration of world government on September 4, 1953 from the city hall of Ellsworth, Maine, being stateless, I designed and had printed the first World Passport which I presented to India's consul in New York to obtain a visa. When he refused to recognize it as a "valid" document, I mentioned that Gandhi was the "father" of modern India and had advocated a world government in the strongest terms. Moreover, I added, that I had been invited to India by one of India's sages to discuss the very formation of that government as a concomitant to India's heritage of  wisdom traditions and values. I insisted he send the passport to New Delhi for either conformation of his refusal or acceptance of the passport for a visa.

   The response from India's government confirmed the consul's refusal with the caveat that I could obtain a 6-month visa on the back of a notarized "Affidavit of Identity" then being issued by steamship companies for those travelers with no other identification. I accepted and when the visa had been stamped on the back of the affidavit, I promptly cut it off and pasted it on the first visa page of my World Passport No. 00001.

   Thus it was that I entered India on March 20, 1956. (See p. 72, My Country is the World).

    Following my visit with the guru during which I became familiar with the Brahma Vidya (Science of the Absolute) teachings, he advised me to "see Pandit Nehru," India’s Prime Minister and close compatriot of Gandhi. I trained to New Delhi after receiving an official OK to see him, spent a half-hour with "Pandiji" and even "issued" him an honorary World Passport which he accepted with a smile remarking "This is the passport Gandhiji would have used."

     I have since traveled to India 5 times identified only by the continually-being upgraded World Passport.

     Now President Obama is in New Delhi also ID'd with an honorary World Passport which I presented to him following his Berlin speech of July 25, 2008 in which he introduced himself to the 200,000 listeners (and the viewing world) as not only a "patriotic American but also a citizen of the world."

     The Times story notes that "Gandhi remains India's patriarch, the founding father whose face is printed on the currency, but modern India is hardly a Gandhian nation."

     "Mr Obama," the article continued, "too, has experienced the clash of those lofty expectations with political realities," noting that "When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, even as he was conducting two wars, he described himself as 'living testimony to the moral force' of the nonviolent movement embodied by Dr. King and Gandhi."

     What then is Obama's present mission in India, one of the nine nuclear weapons states, the U.S. being No. 1? Is it to confirm Gandhi's vision of a nonviolent and peaceful world via a world government? Far from it. As he told the world when accepting the iconic "peace" prize from the Norwegian Nobel committee, referring to both 

Martin Luther King and Gandhi, 

"But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their example alone."

     And there, in one transparent, revelatory confession, you understand our common problem..worldwide.

    The nations divide us..artificially, foolishly and fatally whereas "humanity" ID's us as ALREADY united, functional AND peaceful!

    "You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. If you want to change things, create a new model and you render the existing reality obsolete," wrote Buckminster Fuller. 

And 

Albert 

Einstein advised us that 

"You can never solve a problem on the same level at which it was created." 

     The Times article, after exposing Obama’s mission–"a trip pitched as a jobs mission"-geo-dialectically opposite to Ghandhian nonviolent principles by India's "inching toward a tighter military relationship with the United States," quoted Gandhi's grandson, Gopalkrisna Gandhi that "Today, the need for a practical idealism is recognized throughout the world."

     Are you listening Barack? The good news is that the Millennium is already here! And we World Citizens are it! In short, it's our world and we're taking over!
    And, incidentally, did you "enter" India with your 'practical idealistic' World Passport as a declared World Citizen as has this writer or with the divisive and historically obsolete, possessively-controlled  US document marked "Diplomatic"?

     Your fellow human, Garry D.

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