And now for something entirely different.
When Baba Amte died in 2008 at the age of 93, the world remembered him as this century’s mightiest champion of people affected by leprosy. He was that indeed, but his vision was more complex and more compelling than any one issue could elicit and the more I read about him, the more amazing I see his story is.

The morning of his funeral, Ravi happened to be on a flight to Nagpur, just an hour away from Anandwan, the Ashram Baba Amte founded in 1951 in Maharashtra. On the flight, he met a friend who was going to attend the funeral and Ravi decided to tag along.

Indian crowds are always large, but this funeral was staggering in its sheer numbers. The people were overwhelmingly poor. From every corner of the state, they came on foot and on cycle to pay their last respects to a man who had devoted his entire adult life to inclusion, the environment and the common good.

It began with leprosy. Baba was born in a wealthy Brahmin family and trained to be a lawyer. Along with his wife, he had already abandoned the comfortable life he had been born to in favor of a life with the poor and the marginalized. He had worked to organize the untouchables, the lowest of the low, the people who cleared away “night soil” and for nine months he had worked as a scavenger himself, carrying baskets of human excrement on his head as they did, enduring the filth and the stench. He thought of himself as a man of the people, one who knew no fear.

Then one evening, coming home in a heavy downpour, he passed a leper lying on the road. To his shame, he was disgusted and repelled by the sight of the half-naked man whose hands had been eaten away by the disease and whose body was covered with maggots. He went by quickly, but found, when he reached home, that he could not get the man out of his mind. He forced himself to return with food and a bamboo shelter to protect him from the rain. But that night, he couldn’t sleep. The fear that had overcome him when he saw the man’s wasted limbs now haunted him.

I have never been frightened of anything. Because I fought British tommies to save the honour of an Indian lady, Gandhiji called me ‘abhay sadhak’, a fearless seeker of truth. When the sweepers of Warora challenged me to clean gutters, I did so. But that same person who fought thugs and British bandits quivered in fright when he saw the living corpse of Tulshiram, no fingers, no clothes, with maggots all over.

Baba lived in an agony of spiritual doubt for six months. Finally, he made his decision, not, he said, to do good, but because he could not accept the idea of himself as a person who was afraid: That is why I took up leprosy work. Not to help anyone, but to overcome that fear in my life. That it worked out to be good for others was a by-product. But the fact is I did it to overcome fear.

He and Sadhna, his wife, then immersed themselves in the study of leprosy. Baba went to the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine to learn more and returned with the then new discovery of diamino-diphenyl-sulphone, the wonder drug which could cure the disease. They began opening clinics all over the area until there were 11, with a total of 4000 patients. But the cure wasn’t enough. The stigma and the taboo would not die.

“Joy is more infectious than leprosy,” Baba Amte insisted. The government gave him 50 acres of desolate, dry scrub land and along with a few of his patients, he and Sadhna set out to create a community they called Anandwan or Forest of Joy. It took them two months to dig their first well. Food was difficult to grow and what they did manage to harvest, they were unable to sell because people in the surrounding villages feared infection. It took a contingent of volunteers from the Service Civil International to turn the tide. These fifty young workers from 36 different countries spent several months at Anandwan building a clinic and two hospital wards. Somehow, their presence broke the barrier between the ashram and the local people. The villagers offered to help themselves, bringing food and tools and sharing in the building projects underway.

That was the beginning. Under Baba Amte’s guidance, the ashram grew to become a totally self-reliant community in which only salt, sugar and gasoline had to be purchased from outside. Soon, more homes were built, schools were established, and dozens of cottage industries flourished. Rainwater harvesting, tree plantations, dry toilets, and solar power were just some of the innovations Baba Amte introduced.

His generosity and kindness did not stop with leprosy. He also established schools for blind and deaf children as well as orphanages and old people’s homes. No one was ever turned away. His institutions remain today as models for how such things should be done.

For the last 23 years of his life, Baba Amte was bedridden with a crippling and painful spinal injury. During these years, he turned his imagination to wider issues of peace and justice and lent his influence and his intelligence to movements as diverse as communal harmony, anti-big dams campaigns and environmentally sound development in tribal areas.

He had a deep and abiding respect for Christianity, and particularly for Jesus: What is your plan of sacrifice today? You and I, petty souls, sacrifice for our children. Christ sacrificed for tomorrow’s whole world. Whenever I see slum-dwellers, with their hunger and poverty, that obscene poverty, I feel He is crucified like that. When I come across a person suffering from leprosy, foul-smelling, ulcerous, I can see the imprint of His lips, His kiss. What did they not do to sufferers of leprosy in His time, yet the carpenter’s son cared for them and touched them. That hand is an emblem for me, that hand which cared for the loneliest and the lost. The Christian is … he who not only lights the darkest corner in the world but also the darkest corner in his own heart.

He was a legend in his own time and a man of humor, integrity and charm. Even at the very end, the photographs are of a man with sparkle and energy. The smile is wide, the message is clear: “Joy is more infectious than leprosy.”