“If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?” Lilly, a standard IX student, asked US president Barack Obama during his interaction with schoolchildren last year.
“If you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?” Lilly, a standard IX student, asked US president Barack Obama during his interaction with schoolchildren last year. “I think that it might be Mahatma Gandhi, who is a real hero of mine,” Obama replied. The American president’s admiration for the Father of the Nation is no secret.
He is now set to pay homage to his inspiration by visiting Mani Bhavan, a two-storey building in Gamdevi where Gandhi resided during the freedom struggle, when he visits India in November. Obama’s other role model, Martin Luther King, had also stayed at Mani Bhavan for two days, 51 years ago.
Obama is expected to visit Mani Bhavan on November 6. The US consulate and a White House security team have conducted two security audits of the building. The 35-member team, accompanied by police officials from the state CID, took photographs and maps of the structure on Laburnum Road.
“The US president will be visiting Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, but the dates and places he would go to are not yet confirmed. It is true that a security audit was conducted at Mani Bhavan, but the visit is not yet finalised,” officials from the US consulate said.
Obama is likely to stay at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel during his visit to Mumbai.
According to sources at Mani Bhavan, the US embassy had bought four statues of the Mahatma from them and sent those to the White House after Obama became US president. “In my life, I have always looked to Mahatma Gandhi as an inspiration, because he embodies the kind of transformational change that can be made when ordinary people come together to do extraordinary things,” Obama had said earlier.
In February 2009, Martin Luther King III visited the room at Mani Bhavan where his father had stayed.
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