THE SHADOW OF PARTING 137
Quoting again from the address he continued his
vivisection : " Not only the Inhabitants of Abbottabad,
but even the sun, the moon and the stars here wTere eager
to have a glimpse of me ! Am I to understand, my good
friends, that your city has all to Itself a separate set of
sun, moon and stars which do not shine upon Wardha or
Sevagram ? In Kathiawad we have a class of people
known as bhats or professional bards who make it their job-
to sing the praises of their chieftains for money. Well, I
won't call you bhats — mercenaries ! " (A voice from the
audience : ' We had Instead to pay money along with the
address ! ') But Gandhiji was not to be put off so easily. He-
continued, " Banter apart, I want you to realize that it is
wrong to Indulge in hyperbolic praises of your leaders.
It neither helps them nor their work. I would like you
once for all to forget this practice of presenting laudatory
addresses. At three score and ten, I for one, have no de-
sire to let what little time God has still left me tot be frit-
tered away in listening to hyperbolic balderdash. If an
address must be presented I would like it to be descriptive
of the defects and shortcomings of the recipient of the
address so that he might be helped to turn the searchlight
inward and weed them out.
" Ever since my arrival in this province I have been
trying to expound to the Khudai Khidmatgars the doc-
trine of non-violence in all its uncompromising complete-
ness, abating nothing, holding back nothing. I do not claim
to have understood the meaning of non-violence in its
entirety. What I have realized is only a small and insig-
nificant fraction of the great whole. It is not given to-
imperfect man to grasp the whole meaning of non-vio-
lence or to practise it in full. That is an attribute of God
alone, the Supreme Ruler who suffers no second. But
I have constantly and ceaselessly striven for over half a
century to understand non-violence and to translate it
into my own life. The Khudai Khidmatgars have no
doubt set a brilliant example in the practice of non-vio-
lence, to the extent to which they have understood it. It
has earned for them universal admiration. But they have