As Elvis Presley and. Adolf Hitler forge ahead of others in the media-controlled race for being the man of the century, and all sorts of odd names are invoked in the press as the 10 mok important men of the millennium, the time has come to restore some sort of historical perspective to the issue. You can't seriously consider mass murderers like Stalin or Mao along with Gandhi and Mandela; and it is too early to say that Nelson Mandela would be fondly remembered all over the world a 100 years hence.
So who would be the man of the century in a timely historical prespective? The 20th century is a century in which politics has governed the life of humanity as it has never done before. From that point of view, the man of this century should surely be a politicians spring to my mind in this context. One is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the other is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
What is the dominant political development of the 20th century? Afteir the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, one can say with a fair degree of certainty that it is the rise of the United States as the dominant world power. Now, who made America a superpower? There can be no question that the man under whose leadership the US emerged as a superpower was Roosevelt. He took America into the Second World War and at the end of it the US was the triumphant superpower.
Roosevelt was a good man, and a constructive statesman, too He took America out of the Great Depression by means of the New Deal. He gave a practical demonstration of what the state can do in the sphere of the economy. He is, in that sense, the typical man of the 20th century But embodiment of the spirit of this century is hardly a permanent claim to fame. Wten the 20th century recedes in the memory of men, Roosevelt will also recede., But not Gand ii. As a personal exemplar of the permanent values of humanity, he is a man of all seasons, anc as a liberator of India and the harbinger of the freedom of the Afro-Asian world, he is enough of a man of this century to be voted 'the man of the twentieth century'.
Current public interest is also focus on on the
