Once is a mistake, twice a coincidence, three times is a pattern.

Once again our PM Narendra Modi has referred to Mahatma Gandhi as Mohanlal Karamchand Gandhi and not as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi during the Madison Square address today. It got me thinking if it is really a slip of tongue or there is something which we don’t know about, despite it becoming a controversial issue last time when Modi made this mistake. So like everyone I started the search on google but it didn’t yielded any constructive thing as most of the articles mentioned about the earlier so called slip. Then I started the search at http://books.google.co.in and found that there are some books already scanned & ocr’ed by google which mention Mahatma Gandhi as Mohanlal Karamchand Gandhi. I think this proves that Mahatma Gandhi was indeed called Mohanlal Karamchand Gandhi by some of his contemporaries and it could be that Mr. Modi had read some books/articles during his youth and he may prefer calling him as Mohanlal Karamchand Gandhi and not as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Putting up the links here to the book extracts as well as image of one such book extract.

• Link 1
• Link 2
• Link 3
• Link 4
• Link 5
• Link 6    – “The Autobiography of an Absolutist” text is available here.
• Link 7
• Link 8