Mohandas Gandhi was born in Porbandar, India, in 1869. As a young man, he studied law in London and became a lawyer. Then he took a job far away, in South Africa. One night, a train worker ordered him to leave the first-class car, although he had a ticket. It was only because of the color of his skin. Gandhi sat in the cold station all night and thought. That night changed his life.
He decided to fight unfair laws in a new way: without violence. People can refuse to obey, he said, but they must stay peaceful, even when they are hit. For twenty years he led this quiet fight in South Africa. In 1915 he returned home to India, which was then part of the British Empire.
Gandhi lived very simply, and wore plain white clothes. Every day he sat at his spinning wheel and made his own cotton thread. He asked Indians to make their own cloth instead of buying it from Britain. In 1930, the British said that Indians could not make their own salt. So Gandhi walked almost four hundred kilometers to the sea. Thousands of people walked behind him. He reached the beach and picked up a lump of salt. The whole world watched.
The British sent him to prison many times, but he was never afraid. In 1947, India finally won its independence. But then Hindus and Muslims began to fight each other, and this broke Gandhi's heart. He stopped eating to ask for peace, and people listened to the thin old man. In January 1948, an angry man shot Gandhi as he walked to evening prayers. India cried for its father.
People called him Mahatma — the great soul. His peaceful way of fighting later inspired Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela. Today his birthday is a day of peace all over the world. Gandhi showed that a quiet man without an army can defeat an empire. He once said, 'My life is my message.'