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Lessons in Love

At his City Montessori School in Lucknow, India, Jagdish Gandhi teaches kids how to change the world.

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Sitting in the back seat of his car one evening, Jagdish Gandhi puts away his cell phone and places a handkerchief over his thin knee. It’s time for dinner. What’s he having? A delicious curry? No, raw onions, roughly chopped. “I rarely eat at home. No time,” he explains as he spoons onions into his mouth while his driver honks through the traffic chaos of Lucknow in northern India, home to 2.5 million people. Outside, the air stinks of exhaust and smouldering fires. Inside, tears fill our eyes as we listen to prayer texts from a cassette player.

“Gandhi” is not Jagdish’s real name. He took it as his when he was 12 years old. He is from the countryside, and his parents were poor farmers. One of his uncles told him about Mahatma Gandhi, and Jagdish admired his work for the poor and his peaceful fight against the British colonial overlords. When a Hindu fanatic murdered Gandhi in 1948, Jagdish wanted to change his name immediately. “If your father agrees, you can do this in India,” he says. His father agreed.

Gandhi in some ways resembles his namesake—the 71-year-old is slight but energetic and wears dark-rimmed glasses. He’s also carrying on Mahatma Gandhi’s work through his City Montessori School, which has more than 32,000 pupils scattered among 20 buildings throughout Lucknow. Every three to four years, Gandhi founds a new branch school, because yet again they’re bursting at the seams. Will he someday have 100,000 pupils? “Possibly,” he says. “As many as possible.” But Gandhi wants to do more than teach reading and writing: He wants to change the world.

At the Indira Nagar School, one of the 20 branch schools, Gandhi hurries like a whirlwind into the building. Two hundred children are sitting on the floor. Their hair is neatly combed; their blue-, red- and grey-striped ties are perfectly tied. Gandhi “just wants to say a few words,” but then speaks for a good hour on war and peace. No one dares whisper.

“Throughout the world,” he tells those gathered, “there are are enough atomic bombs to destroy our globe one thousand times over. The people building the bombs tell us that the bombs bring us peace, that human beings must kill each other for peace. Is that what you want?”

The children shout, “No!”

Gandhi looks out at his young audience. “We are all children of the same father. Why should we kill each other?” he asks. “Every one of us is equally close to God.”

Seventy percent of City Montessori School pupils are Hindu, one-quarter are Muslim and the rest are Christian, Buddhist, Sikh or Jewish. In daily life, however, it makes no difference. “You can come to Lucknow by bus, plane or train, right? The ways are different, but the goal is the same,” says Sudersh Kaur, a Sikh and one of the 20 principals.

For such tolerant views, the school won the UNESCO prize five years ago for teaching peace. That’s a special recognition in the conflict-ridden Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. At the same time Gandhi was speaking to his pupils, for example, Muslims were being chased through the streets of a neighbouring city, their businesses destroyed in revenge for the murder of a Hindu parliament member.

Gandhi, himself a practising member of the Baha’i sect, which embraces equality between the sexes and tolerance of all religions, believes religious racism is one of the major evils of the day. “Krishna came to us 5,000 years ago, Christ 2,000 years ago, Muhammad 1,400 years ago,” he says. “All of them are messengers sent from the same God.” What better recipients of this message than children? Teach them while they’re young, according to Gandhi.

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