I would have liked to have dinner with Mahatma Gandhi: Obama

Washington, Sep 9 (IANS) US President Barack Obama has said that if he could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would be Mahatma Gandhi, adding he is 'a real hero of mine'.

Obama had gone to Wakefield High School in Arlington to give a speech welcoming students back to school, when he took a few questions from ninth-graders.

Lily, a student, asked: 'And if you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?'

'Well, you know, dead or alive, that's a pretty big list,' Obama was quoted as saying by Los Angeles Times Wednesday.

'You know, I think that it might be Gandhi, who is a real hero of mine.'

Obama said: 'Now, it would probably be a really small meal because, he didn't eat a lot.'

'But he's somebody who I find a lot of inspiration in. He inspired Dr. (Martin Luther) King, so if it hadn't been for the non-violent movement in India, you might not have seen the same non-violent movement for civil rights here in the United States.'

Obama told the students that Gandhi represents the power of change through ethics and how to use that morality to foster change, themes he has repeated through his presidential campaign and administration.

Facing sharp divisions in Congress and within his own Democratic Party, Obama stressed Gandhi's fighting spirit and will to overcome long odds.

Gandhi helped 'people who thought they had no power realise that they had power and then helped people who had a lot of power realise that if all they're doing is oppressing people, then that's not a really good exercise of power'.

Mahi is dead - Uncovered manholes - Is there a solution?

All hopes of four-year-old Mahi coming alive out of the 70-foot-deep borewell at Kasna village here were dashed on Sunday afternoon, when Army personnel brought out her decomposed body after an 86-hour rescue operation that had kept the people nationwide glued to their TV sets.

The operation — launched soon after Mahi fell into the borewell on Wednesday night during her birthday celebrations and was prolonged by almost 48 hours as the rescue team ran into rocky terrain — ended around 1.30 p.m. on Sunday, when a team of personnel pulled her out.

The girl, wrapped in a green cloth, was immediately rushed to the ESIC Hospital at Manesar in an Army ambulance, amid loud applause by locals who had gathered at the spot in large numbers since early morning, anticipating a successful climax. But the child was declared dead on arrival at the hospital. The body was then sent to the Gurgaon Civil Hospital mortuary.

Post-mortem revealed that Mahi died of asphyxia just in a couple of hours of the fall. “She died three-four hours after she fell into the borewell,” said a doctor at the Gurgaon Civil Hospital.

The rescue team had reached Mahi in the early hours of Sunday, negotiating around a boulder in the rescue tunnel, but there was delay as it had to cut through a rock in the borewell also, where the bloated body was found stuck.