Throughout the world, almost all nations will be celebrating from October 2this year the birth centenary of Mahatma Gandhi who is now universallyrecognised as the glorious symbol of truth and non-violence. Gandhiji was notonly a great national leader who liberated India from foreign dominationthrough a peaceful and bloodless struggle, but also a profound thinker whoplaced before the world certain eternal principles for the guidance of humanrelationship and international behaviour. He laid the greatest stress on thepurity of the means for the achievement of noble ends. “The means may belikened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolableconnection between the means and the end as there is between the seed andthe tree.”1 The Mahatma never compromised his adherence to this ideal evenfor the attainment of Swaraj for India. He was convinced beyond any shadow ofdoubt that this method of righteousness was, “ultimately, the shortest,although it may appear to be long, perhaps too long.” 2To Gandhiji, civilization, in the real sense of the term, consisted “not in themultiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary restriction of wants.” 3 Healways upheld the sublime aim of “simple living and high thinking”. While hestrained every nerve to provide gainful employment to the hungry millions ofIndia through various constructive activities, he underscored the imperativeneed for raising the ‘standard of life’ of the people, including the ethical andmoral aspects. To him mere affluence and accumulation of material wealth was‘a primrose path’ leading to social, economic and cultural disintegration. “Trueeconomics,” affirmed Gandhiji, “never militates against the highest ethicalstandard.” “An economics that inculcates Mammon worship, and enables thestrong to amass wealth at the expense of the weak, is a false and dismalscience.” 4 At a time when a number of developed countries are faced with this‘tragedy of mere affluence’ it would be worth our while recollecting MahatmaGandhi’s insistence on higher values for the establishment of a new worldorder. As a recent editorial in the New Statesman captioned ‘Not By BreadAn Autobiography or My Experiments with Truthwww.mkgandhi.org Page 3Alone’ stated, “there is evidently a hunger in the world for governments whichare activated by moral principles, which take decisions not because they areexpedient, but because they are right.” 5