Many an Indian writer, or a writer about India, has prefaced a reminiscent paragraph with ‘it was thanks to Sanjoy Roy…,’ a tribute to the fashioner of festivals that celebrate literature in its many forms, the written and spoken word certainly, but also stage and song, life and legend. The last two occasionally coalesce as they did last winter at a festival in Spring Hill, Florida, where at the ‘Wellcome Om Holistic Wellness Center’ I spent two days with a gentle American who had ventured to ‘become’ Gandhi.
Perry Garfinkel is not the first to venture into a life lived by others. In 2015, banker Tushar Vashisht and engineer Matt Cherian spent three weeks in Bangalore living on a hundred rupees a day and a fourth week at the then poverty line of 32 rupees a day, personifying the Gandhian talisman of the ‘poorest and weakest person’ to whom any step taken must make a difference.