Recent travel schedules have found me encountering Gandhi more substantively than I ordinarily do. Immersed as we in India are in Gandhi — currency notes, monuments, street names, anniversaries, and myriad other references — it’s easy to believe that we are familiar with him. The pivotal moments of his life story, and their cinematic depictions by Bollywood and Hollywood alike, are part of the landscape of our consciousness. Many of us have read one or more of his publications and biographies or visited a museum dedicated to him. Most of us can sing his favourite hymn or spout his most quotable quotes. He is so ubiquitous we scarcely notice him anymore.

I had never previously visited either the Sabarmati Ashram where he established his base in 1917, shortly after his return to India from South Africa in 1915, nor the museum and memorial at Birla House where he was assassinated. Neither venue is particularly well-designed or managed. Too many of the displays are either terribly kitsch or rather uninspiring, text-heavy placards. There is a lot of information but very little sense of Gandhi – the man or the messiah. The best memorials and museums are able to transport visitors to the time and milieu of their honourees. These feel perfunctory in comparison.

Yet. The singularity that is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi manages to arrest you, seize your attention and provoke questions, invite reflection about his choices, your own and those we have made collectively as a nation state. His interests and opinions are wide ranging – from religion to culture, economics, education, gender, sex, food habits, politics and philosophy. There is scarcely a topic on which he hasn’t expressed a point of view, often a contrarian one.

From contemporaries like Tolstoy and Tagore to Einstein who responded with awe, and those who sought inspiration for their own struggles in his teaching like Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela among many others, to those who shun him and his views for their racist, casteist, anti-feminist views or those who hold him responsible for India’s Partition – the reactions he evokes are powerful and often extreme. He has indisputably had the greatest impact of any Indian ever, rivalled perhaps only by the Buddha. Even his greatest critics, in their continuing battles with his views more than seven decades after his death, acknowledge his influence.

In an era when narrative change, framing, behaviour change communication, propaganda, disinformation and fake news are all the rage, few come close to emulating Gandhi’s success as a communicator and marketer of world-changing ideas that successfully mobilised millions during his lifetime and millions thereafter. His use of language, metaphor, symbolism and the example of his own life choices continue to inspire immense respect, if not sheer amazement.

As India and too many other places around the world slide deeper each day into the kind of hate-mongering and violence that cost Gandhi his life, we need more than ever to remind ourselves of, and to re-examine, his philosophy of ahimsa and satyagraha. Likewise, at a time when untrammelled capitalism threatens to devour our societies and our planet, his ideas on markets and economic principles need urgent revisiting.

Perhaps now that it is acceptable to go beyond unconditional worship of Gandhi it is time we created contemporary ways to engage with his views and legacy. An institutional space dedicated to his values of openness to universal ideas that would be home to civil discourse and debate on all the topics he cared about might be a fitting monument to this Great Soul. Another superficial shrine to shallow showiness would be an enormous lost opportunity.