Gandhiji in London

There was news during the weekend of Mahatma Gandhi’s statue being unveiled in London’s iconic Parliament Square. Indeed a historic moment of glory for India with a twist of irony also – after all it was Gandhiji who drove out the British from India. And in that context, we should admit that the British have been generous in giving Gandhiji this glory; given the growing levels of intolerance in India, it is very unlikely that something like this would allowed here. If there had been a say, Mountbatten statue in India, surely it would have been razed down to the ground.

Anyway, the point here is that this is good work by the the Gandhi Statue Memorial Trust. This is the trust which was formed to raise funds to put up the statue. The news here is that, no surprisingly, Infosys was the biggest donor to this Trust, contributing 250,000 pounds or Rs.2.3 crore. The Trust, when it was formed had aimed to collect 1 million pounds and quarter million came in from Infosys alone. That apart personally, Narayana Murthy and family, over and above this quarter million, contributed another 2 million pounds. So what this means is that Infosys alone contributed almost half of the targeted amount to the Trust.

Other major donors included Rahul Bajaj (200,000 pounds), Lakshmi Mittal and family (100,000 pounds), NRI hotelier Vivek Chadha (100,000 pounds) and Sun Mark director Rami Ranger (100,000 pounds).