By Arun Gandhi, Bethany Hegedus
Gandhi's own grandson remembers the day the great man taught him that anger, like lightning, can burn a house down or light a lamp.
Young Arun Gandhi and his family move to Sevagram, his grandfather's service village in India, where he finds out how hard it is to be the grandson of a man the whole world calls a saint. During a soccer game another boy shoves him, his temper flares, and he is left ashamed — certain that a true Gandhi would never feel such a thing. He carries the shame to his grandfather, bracing to be scolded. Instead the Mahatma tells him that everyone feels it, even him, and that the feeling is like electricity: it can strike like lightning and destroy, or be channeled through a lamp to give light. Arun tells this from his own boyhood, in his own voice, wrapped in Evan Turk's stitched-and-painted art.
This one carries the unit's values rather than its doctrine, and that is a valuable, different job. It is less about what Hindus believe than about how one of the twentieth century's great practitioners of nonviolence learned, as a child, to handle his own anger — so your students meet a faith through a person living it, not a list of tenets. The feeling at its center is universal: every child knows the shame of losing their temper, and the lamp image gives them something concrete to do with it. Told in Arun's real first-person voice, it lands as memory rather than lesson, which is why it stays with a class.