The story of Mahatma Gandhi was a very inspiring story to me. Gandhi is a personal all time favorite to me. The way he sees the world and his teaching is very unique in the sense that many of the great leaders had applied his concept. Gandhi was the father of India. He free India from the hands of the British but unfortunately was assassinated at the age of 78 on 30 January 1948.
From the movie, a theory from the social psychology had attract me which is the theory of persuasion. Persuasion is defined as a process of consciously attempting to change a person’s attitude through the transmission of messages (Franzoi, 2009). There are three factors that increase the success rate to persuade others which is:
(ii) Similarity to the audience
(iii) Physical attractiveness
Based on the following factors, Gandhi who acquired at least two of the traits. Firstly, he acquired the traits of similarity to the audience. Gandhi is a Muslim and also a Hindu which makes him easily be accepted by the people of India. Besides, he came from a rich background but he give up his wealth and get down to the earth to be part of the poverty people. His act had gain the trust of many people and also the support of the people of India that lived in poverty. Try to imagine that if he did not give up his wealth, it will be harder for him to gain the trust of the people. People will not conform to your persuasion if they think that you can’t feel them.
Secondly, the similarity with audience had give an advantage to Gandhi to gain the likability by the public. he usually praise people on what they had done even they did bad things. In one of the scene where Muslims and Hindus are fighting, a man confess to Gandhi that he had take revenge on a Muslim child by killing the child. However, Gandhi did not curse him or disgrace him instead he give a solution to the man by asking him to adopt an Muslim orphan as compensate. From here you can see that this is also one of the reason that his order was obey by the public.
Another concept that I want to share is the weapon effect. In order to show to Gandhi that they had stop the fight between the Muslims and the Hindus, a group of Muslims people had drop their weapon in front of Gandhi. Mostly when people see weapon, people will tend to link it to aggression and this is the weapon effect. When the weapon is being drop which means that they willing to stay peace by stopping all aggression act. In most of the movies, they tend to show that people dropping their weapon to indicate that they are willing to stop fighting.
A quote that I find it very meaningful from the movie : “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” this is a wonderful quote by Mahatma Gandhi.