It must be in their DNA.
The daughter of a man of nonviolence and the grandson of a man of peace who lived a world away together urged a room of business executives in Atlanta on Tuesday to find a way to redefine themselves with a moral purpose rather than focus solely on profits.
There’s nothing wrong with making money, but it can achieved with spiritual balance, said Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, a leader in India’s independence movement and an advocate for nonviolence and peace.
“There is this emphasis on materialism,” he said. “You can’t become greedy and selfish when more than half the world lives in poverty. We can ignore that at our own peril.”
Gandhi and Bernice King, the daughter of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were the keynote speakers during the second annual Global Purpose Summit, which brought together business leaders to address ways to benefit society while at the same time creating new business models.
The summit, held at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, was sponsored in part by BrightHouse and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
It brought together the descendants of two of the world’s most well-known civil and human rights icons.
“Their messages live on through their future generations as they continue to inspire business to serve the world,” said Joey Reiman, CEO and founder of BrightHouse, an Atlanta-based consulting firm.
Gandhi, an author and noted speaker who turns 80 this year, lives in Rochester, N.Y., and runs the Gandhi Worldwide Education Institute. He said he inherited his purpose to make a difference and to teach nonviolence in the world from his grandfather.
He was sent by his parents to live with his grandfather in India when he was 12 for a couple of years and left just a few months before he was assassinated in 1948.
“You have to make a conscious effort to say every morning that I am going to be a better human being today than I was yesterday,” he said during an earlier interview. “It’s not a switch that you can turn off and on. Despite being born into that philosophy, I still have to work on it myself.”
King, CEO of the King Center, said her father, who was assassinated 20 years later, got his “tactics from Mahatma Gandhi and inspiration from Jesus Christ” to follow a philosophy of nonviolence.
“Today, people all over the world are looking to that legacy for inspiration and direction on how to cure the social ills in our society,” she said.
The quest for the success is admirable, but “if we don’t understand our responsibility to each other, then we are going to essentially undermine and sabotage humanity,” she said.
Before they spoke, King and Gandhi talked privately. It was not the first time the two had met, although, even for them, the details were foggy.
Gandhi said they met some time ago in a church in the southwest. She asked about his work, his family and whether his children were following in his footsteps.
Perhaps, she said, they might work together.
In turn, he invited King to join one of his annual Gandhi Legacy Tours to India, during which he traces his grandfather’s footsteps and exposes people first-hand to the struggles of those in greatest need.
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