Hind Swaraj (1909), chapter XVI
The Seed and the Tree
In November 1909 Mahatma Gandhi boarded the steamship Kildonan Castle in Southampton to sail back to South Africa. He was traveling with Hajee Habib, a merchant who had joined him on a deputation to London. Their mission had failed, and British officials had refused their requests. During the trip, young Indian revolutionaries in London had told Gandhiji that assassinations were the only way to win rights. Madan Lal Dhingra had shot Sir Curzon Wyllie dead that summer. Gandhiji sat in his cabin to answer them in a book called Hind Swaraj, which means Indian home rule (swaraj, said swuh-RAHJ). When his right hand tired, he wrote with his left.
In chapter XVI of Hind Swaraj, he wrote: "The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree." Most people treat a method like a train ticket that you throw away once you arrive. They think they can lie to get a job, or bully a team into working faster. Gandhiji said that is like planting a weed and expecting a rose. The actions you take do not disappear when you finish the task. They shape the result you have to live with.
Therefore
Pay attention to how you do your work today, not just what you hope to finish. If the method is rotten, the result will be rotten too.
Indian Opinion, December 1909
When the ship docked in South Africa, Gandhiji printed the text in his weekly paper in South Africa, Indian Opinion. In January 1910 he published it as a booklet. British officials in Bombay thought any talk of home rule was an incitement to violence, so they banned the booklet in March. Gandhiji did not fight the ban in court. Instead, he translated the whole text into English under the title Indian Home Rule and mailed copies to London. The translation proved that he was telling young men to drop their weapons, not pick them up. It showed that if you win freedom by murder, murder becomes the way you govern.
A small reminder, on the desk or the laptop, that how you do your work today decides what the finished thing will be.
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