Gandhiji was one of the very few great men of the world who set the stamp of their personalities of an epoch. In reality, Gandhiji was not just a man or a superman but a rare phenomenon that the world may witness once in a millennium. He ruled literally fifty crore of Indians for long thirty years, without any claim to power or authority; inspired them, guided them and finally led them to their inevitable destiny by providing them independence from British rule on August 15, 1947. Hence, it is most  appropriate to call Gandhiji a magician who hypnotized the people, a mystic who tried to impress the image of God upon the faces of brutes, a soldier  who fought with the weapons of a saint.

With the real name Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Gandhiji  has been bestowed with the titles, ‘Father of the Nation’, ‘Bapu’, and ‘Mahatma’.  He was the messenger of truth and non-violence by which he liberated our beloved motherland  from the British yoke. Hence, the legacy of Gandhiji is found all over the world.

In India

1. Gandhi’s birthday, 2nd  October, famous as Gandhi Jayanti,  is a National Holiday in India.

2. India observes January  30, the day of Gandhi’s assassination, as “Martyr’s  Day”, to commemorate those who gave up their lives in service of the  nation.

3. The Government of India every year, in memory of Bapu gives the  Mahatma Gandhi Peace Prize to distinguished social workers, world leaders and citizens. The prominent  recipients are Nelson Mandela, the leader of South Africa’s struggle,    .

4. In 1996, the Government of India introduced the Mahatma Gandhi series of currency notes in rupees 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 and 1000 denomination. Today, all the currency notes in circulation in India contain a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi.

5. In New Delhi, the Birla Bhavan,   where Gandhiji was assassinated on 30th January 1948, was acquired by the Government of India in 1971 and opened to the public in 1973 as the Gandhi Smriti or “Gandhi Remembrance”. It preserves the room where Mahatma Gandhi lived the last four months of his life and the grounds where he was shot while holding his nightly public walk. A Martyr’s Column now marks the place where Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated.

6. Thousands of public welfare schemes, schools, colleges, hospitals, institutions, organizations, roads, bridges, buildings in India are named after Gandhiji.

7. Gandhi’s books including his autobio- graphy were published by the Indian government under the name ‘The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi’ in the 1960s. The writings comprise about 50,000 pages published in about a hundred volumes.

Throughout the World

1. On 15th June 2007, the “UN General Assembly”  unanimously declared  2nd  October as the “International Day of Non-Violence.”

2. Time magazine named Gandhiji the ‘Man of the Year’ in 1930. Gandhi was also the runner-up to Albert Einstein as “Person of the Century” at the end of 1999. Time Magazine named The Dalai Lama,  Martin Luther King(Jr),  Cesar Chavez, Aung San Suu Kyi, Benigno Aquino, Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela as Children of Gandhi and his spiritual heirs to non-violence. The President of the United States Barack Obama said that he is so much influenced by Gandhiji. Several world famous writers  have undertaken the task of describing Gandhi's life.

3. In 1969, the United Kingdom issued a series of stamps commemorating the centenary of Mahatma Gandhi. In the United Kingdom, there are several prominent statues of Gandhi, most notably in Tavistock Square, London near University College London where he studied law. 30th January is commemorated in the United Kingdom as the “National Gandhi Remembrance Day.”

4. In the United States, there are statues of Gandhi outside the Union Square Park in New York City, and the Martin Luther King  (Jr) National Historic Site in Atlanta, and on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., near the Indian Embassy. There is a Gandhi statue in San Francisco Embarcadero Neighborhood.

5. The city of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa-where Gandhi was ejected from a first-class train in 1893—now hosts a commemorative statue. There are wax statues of Gandhi at the Madame Tussaud’s wax museums in London, New York, and other cities around the world.

6. Gandhiji never received the Nobel Peace Prize, although he was nominated 5 times between 1937 and 1948, including the first-ever nomination by the American Friends Service Committee. Decades later, the Nobel Committee publicly declared its regret for the omission, and admitted to deeply divided nationalistic opinion denying the award. Mahatma Gandhi was to receive the Prize in 1948, but his assassination prevented the award. The Prize was not awarded in 1948, the year of Gandhi’s death, on the grounds that “there was no suitable living candidate” that year, and when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was “in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi.”

7. On 30th January every year, on the death anniversary of  Mahatma Gandhi, in schools of many countries, the School Day of Non-violence and Peace is observed. It was founded in Spain in 1964.