My visit to South Africa had memorable moments outside of the cricket field as well, the most significant being my visit to the Phoenix settlement that Gandhi had founded near Durban. South Africa was the country where Gandhi began his transformation from a Gujarati Baniya lawyer into a great visionary leader of the masses. The transformative journey is believed to have begun on a railway platform in a small town called Pietermaritzburg, where he was thrown out of a train because he was travelling in a first-class compartment not meant for Blacks and ‘coolies’.
India had a game against Namibia scheduled at Pietermaritzburg, and the local administration arranged a visit to that infamous station. There was even a short train journey played out for the players and the media—we rode in an exact replica of the train that Gandhi was travelling in when the incident took place. The area where Gandhi is supposed to have been dumped from the train has been marked, and for his followers it is now a pilgrimage spot. The whole recreation of the incident was like a dream for me as I sat in the replica train and tried to imagine what it might have been like for Gandhi back in 1893.
When I was a college student in Amritsar, I had devoured every bit of information I could find on Gandhi. But I could never have imagined that one day I would be standing in faraway South Africa on the same platform, at the same spot where his journey of change had begun. At that spot, there is a plaque that reads: ‘In the vicinity of this plaque
— source thewire.in | Pradeep Magazine | 08/12/2021