"Mahatma Gandhi and the OO Paradigm" - Pantheon Systems Journal

Mahatma Gandhi and the OO Paradigm
by Niranjan Ramakrishnan

We have a poster in our office lobby. It has a picture of Mahatma Gandhi, and the following quotation from him,

"The customer is the most important person on our premises.
He is not dependent on us, we are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption of our work, he is the purpose of it.
He is not an outsider on our business, he is part of it.
We are not doing him a favour by serving him,
He is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so."

At an recent exhibition, we had this poster prominently featured in our booth, as we felt it accurately reflected our corporate attitude. Visitors were invariably impressed by the pithy wisdom, but many were puzzled that these were Gandhi's words. Some even wondered why he would say something that one might more naturally associate with the spoutings of some management guru or a retired captain of industry.

We tried to explain to them that Gandhi was a multi-faceted man, one whose writings spanned every subject under the sun, including: agriculture, education, science, sanitation, economics, literature, industry, women, children, health, family planning, religion, and, of course, politics. Many were surprised to learn of his prolific writing, and were astounded to hear that he had probably written more than anyone else in history (his collected works run to over 100 volumes, several hundred pages each).

The problem one faces in the modern age, and one that object technology has succeeded in addressing so brilliantly, is as follows. Faced with the glut of information, one tries to 'normalize' everything by reducing it one dimension. This is actually a difficult task at first, and an index of proficiency in object technology is often taken to be the ability to pigeonhole, stereotype, categorize, classify things - of course, in as natural and aesthetic a manner as possible. We tell people that this is the most efficient way of dealing with information. Object technologists are not alone in this belief - marketeers have come to the same recognition, and did so years before the cogent articulation of this philosophy in the computer science world. In 1972, Trout and Ries wrote their article on 'positioning', arguing that the way a product is 'slotted' in the mind of the consumer determines its success or failure.

To put it another way, Gandhi has been catalogued in one's mind under the categories, 'Freedom fighter', 'Man of Peace', 'Non-violence' and the like. Therefore the idea that he could have said anything about running businesses seems outlandish.

Well, inconvenient though it may be for us object-wallahs, he did. If you want to think about it in Java, he implemented interfaces for Journalist, Lawyer, Doctor, Farmer, Weaver, Naturalist, Teacher...Saint - a rather long list in fact.

And that's not the only trouble he has given us. He loathed information hiding. He insisted on living his life in public, saying that everything about a public figure should be public. He had no private possessions (and refused to be protected - hence his assassination in 1948).

He also emphasized the equal importance of ends and means. Object technology, however, teaches us to focus on the ends (interface) and not quibble too much about the means (implementation).

As to polymorphism, whose best advantage in the real world appears to be in finding out how a different interpretation (to one's advantage, naturally) could be laid upon the words in a contract, an anecdote illustrates Gandhi's approach.

Gandhi's word was his bond - in letter and spirit.
At one point in his life he forsook cow's milk, to highlight the cruelty inflicted upon cows in India. Some years later, owing to severe health problems, he was told he absolutely needed milk to save his health. He relented, and began taking goat milk. He wrote, though, that in doing so he had technically kept the vow but was under no illusion that he had maintained its spirit for, although he had promised to forsake only cow's milk, he had had in his mind the entire animal kingdom. He did not believe in verbal legedermain.

But Gandhi used polymorphism in his own way. He made a powerful case that the Bhagavad Gita, a divine discourse set in the midst of a battlefield, must really be interpreted as an argument within the heart, and that the war theater described in the text was one's own soul.

On inheritance, Gandhi was very clear - he owned nothing and left behind nothing - nothing material, that is. The Gandhi Museum in New Delhi, India has his entire worldly possessions displayed in a small glass enclosure: a pair of spectacles, his sandals, some basic articles of clothing, and his prayer beads. The whole affair could not weigh more than 10 lbs. altogether.

What he did leave behind was an enormous body of work, a free country, a demonstration that principles matter, a nation whose people had gained self-respect - one might even say he thought of himself as an interface who (after much 'reflection', to be sure) told his successors exactly how they could 'implement him':

"After I am gone, none of you will be able to completely take my place. But if everyone puts (others) first and themselves last, the void will to a large extent have been filled."

In another place he even provided the protocol (we paraphrase from the original English):

void beGood(); // The void says expect no return void doGood(); // ditto void fightInjustice(); // ditto

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