The Danish Peace Academy, Mohandas Gandhi and Nordic countries, Letter 88 to Esther Faering, February 10, 1926

I have your letter and I have the parcel too from Menon. There are no directions in the parcel beyond saying that there is a powder as an opening medicine and the contents of the bottle are for malaria. So far as I am myself concerned at the present moment, I am free. If I get a renewal of the attack I do not know that I can take the medicine, for as you are aware, I can take only five ingredients during any 24 hours whether for food or for medicine.^¹³² Most of these Ayurvedic medicines contain dozens of ingredients. Therefore, however useful they may be in themselves, for me they are perfectly useless. But so many people get malaria here and I would gladly try Menon’s remedy if I get the directions. Please, therefore, ask him to send them to me and if he knows the ingredients, he may give me an idea of them.

Now about Friendship. You have used the word ‘friend’ in three different senses. If we have the capacity, we can all become friends as Jesus was. There, the word ‘friend’ means a kind helper. The friendship between ourselves and those who are superior to us is also a one-sided thing. A father is and should be his children’s friend. There it becomes companionship with the good, satsanga as it is called in Sanskrit. What I have written about is intimacy between two or more persons, where there is no secret and where mutual help is the consequence of, not a motive for, friendship. The motive is some indefinable attraction. It is this exclusive relationship which I have considered to be undesirable and antagonistic to communion with God.

Such was the friendship between the person I have described in the Autobiography and myself. ^¹³³

Does not spinning naturally interest you? I should expect you, if you spin at all, to spin because you are interested in it. And if you are interested, you should master the mechanism and keep your instrument in perfect order as you will keep your stove in order if you are interested in cooking.

Spinning for me is an emblem of fellowship with the poorest of the land and its daily practice is a renewal of the bond between them and ourselves. Thus considered, it is for me a thing of beauty and joy for ever. I would rather to go without a meal than without the wheel and I would like you to understand this great implication of the wheel. If you are to spin at all, I do not expect you to take up the wheel simply because I commend or the Congress recommends or because it is likely to be of economic value.

Source: a photostat at the National Archives of India; Collected Works, Volume 29, pages 453-54

132 This was a vow of Gandhi.

133 In Part I, Chapters VI and VII, of the autobiography which had been published in Young India on January 21 and 28, 1926, Gandhi described his friendship at school with Sheikh Mehtab who had persuaded him to eat meat and caused him to be cruel to his wife.

The Danish Peace Academy

GANDHI AND NORDIC COUNTRIES