Damn...

That man was truly something else. I had a chance to watch Attenborough's 1982 film about Gandhi, and its pretty clear why his whole approach to the foreign invader problem worked so well at the time, with an enemy like the one he faced.

What really struck me about him, however...was not so much the non-violent protest (people like those are a dime a dozen these days), but more his defiance. It was fiery yet non-violent, non-lethal yet so dangerous. Especially that one line in the film where he says, "They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then, they will have my dead body...not my obedience."

I lost it when I heard that...respect to the man. It is that defiance, that undeterred drive with compassion its eternal partner I see so lacking in our world as it stands today. Today you have mostly drive, with little compassion, or compassion, often unaccompanied by drive. Seldom do I see the right mix of the two.