One of the most renowned patrons of non-violence and ahimsa, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, better known as Mahatma Gandhi, was a man who had a tremendous role to play in the Indian struggle for Independence, employing methods of non-violence and civil disobedience, earning him the title of “Father of the Nation”. Mahatma Gandhi was a man who was staunchly against the practice of racial discrimination and injustice on the basis of hierarchy in caste.
Mahatma Gandhi, through his ideals of non-violence, inspired several world leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, who followed in his footsteps, thus having an impact on the lives of people across the world. In India, he had a tremendous role to play in eliminating untouchability and discrimination on the basis of caste to a large degree.
Check out these facts about Gandhi:
1 Mahatma Gandhi was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1930, and runner-up for Time’s Person of the Century.
2 Mahatma Gandhi was of the opinion that ‘untouchability is a crime against humanity’ and discouraged the theory of downtrodden in the name of caste hierarchy, and encouraged inter-caste marriages.
3 Being a football aficionado, he founded two football clubs while working in South Africa as a lawyer between 1893-1915. Both teams were called The Passive Resisters, and were founded in Johannesburg and Pretoria.
4 He was a great advocate of self-control; according to him, the solution to the population problem in India lay in self-control, and not birth control. It is also widely speculated that, in order to test his resolve to chastity, he used to sleep naked next to young Indian girls.
5 Gandhi has had a great influence on many leaders of the 20th century, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Aung San Suu Kyi, and Nelson Mandela.
Nikola Tesla is a thoroughly underrated man: born in 1856, Tesla was constantly overshadowed by fellow scientists despite his contributions to the world being equal to, if not greater than theirs. A man of exceptional brilliance, Tesla worked with another brilliant man- Edison, early in his career.
If we were to credit Tesla with all his inventions, it will take a long time: he has over 300 patents to his name. He invented the AC current, which fuels every household on the planet today; he came up with the idea of radar; he discovered X-Rays; he was amongst the first to experiment with cryogenic engineering; he was the first person to ever record radio waves from outer space; he discovered the resonant frequency of the earth; he invented the remote control; the electric motor was his brainchild, and so was wireless communication. We can go on and on, but the list is endless, and therefore, highly time-consuming.
Check out these facts about Nikola Tesla:
1 Tesla stayed awake for over 22 hours, never sleeping for more than 2 hours a day. He was also prey to extreme OCD, and famously, remained abstinent.
2 Tesla proposed the idea of AC current, but was never recognised for his invention, as people chose to go with Edison’s proposal of the DC current, partly due to Edison’s renown at the time.
3 Tesla is credited with having predicted the internet. He said – “The household’s daily  newspaper will [one day] be printed ‘wirelessly’ in the home during the nightâ€. Talk about perfect predictions!
4 Nikola Tesla was of the belief that women would outclass men in societal standing in the future, and said that “this struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as superior”.
5 Nikola Tesla spent over $2000 USD to build a device that could support/heal the broken leg and wing of a white female pigeon, towards whom Tesla, in the last years of his life, developed a great deal of affection.
