{FN44-4} Miss Slade reminded me of another distinguished Western woman, Miss Margaret Woodrow Wilson, eldest daughter of America's great president. I met her in New York; she was intensely interested in India. Later she went to Pondicherry, where she spent the last five years of her life, happily pursuing a path of discipline at the feet of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh. This sage never speaks; he silently greets his disciples on three annual occasions only. {FN44-5} For years in America I had been observing periods of silence, to the consternation of callers and secretaries. {FN44-6} Harmlessness; nonviolence; the foundation rock of Gandhi's creed. He was born into a family of strict Jains, who revere AHIMSA as the root-virtue. Jainism, a sect of Hinduism, was founded in the 6th century B.C. by Mahavira, a contemporary of Buddha. Mahavira means "great hero"; may he look down the centuries on his heroic son Gandhi! {FN44-7} Hindi is the lingua franca for the whole of India. An Indo-Aryan language based largely on Sanskrit roots, Hindi is the chief vernacular of northern India. The main dialect of Western Hindi is Hindustani, written both in the DEVANAGARI (Sanskrit) characters and in Arabic characters. Its subdialect, Urdu, is spoken by Moslems. {FN44-8} Gandhi has described his life with a devastating candor in THE STORY OF MY EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1927-29, 2 vol.