A rare speech of Mahatma Gandhi [Images], dwelling on non-violence, communal amity and the horrors of a multiplication of atom bombs, has surfaced in America, bringing out of oblivion one of the only two recorded addresses by him in English.
    
The speech recorded on April 2, 1947, just 10 months before the father of the nation was assassinated, was largely lost to the world, except for some excerpts available on internet.

A few years back, an Italian cellphone firm made a commercial using some parts of it.
    
During a recent US trip, Gandhi's grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi came across the recording of the full speech, preserved for 60 years by John Cosgrove, a former president of the National Press Club who got it from Alfred Wagg, a journalist. Wagg had recorded the address in New Delhi.
    
According to Rajmohan, there were only two occasions when Gandhi was recorded speaking in English, The Washington Post reported. The other speech, about religious issues, was recorded in the 1930s.
    
The speech visits the same themes that Gandhi is identified with -- the importance of nonviolence, the eradication of the caste system, amity between Hindus and Muslims and a world united against violence and exploitation.
    
"A friend asked yesterday, did I believe in one world?" Gandhi says at one point. "Of course I believe in one world .
And how can I possibly do otherwise? ... You can redeliver that message now in this age of democracy, in the age of awakening of the poorest of the poor."

Against the backdrop of the just-concluded second world war, atom bomb attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the holocaust of the Jews, Gandhi also talked about finding a way to help the West turn away from violence.
    
"What I want you to understand -- if you can -- that the message of the East, the message of Asia, is not to be learned through European spectacles, through Western spectacles, not by imitating the tension of the West, the gunpowder of theWest, the atom bomb of the West," Gandhi said.
    
"Christianity became disfigured when it went to the West," Gandhi says. "I am sorry to have to say that, but that is my feeling ... the West today is pining for wisdom.

    
"The West today is despairing of multiplication of atom bombs, because a multiplication of atom bombs means utter destruction, not merely of the West, but it will be a destruction of the world, as if the prophecy of the Bible is going to be fulfilled, and there is to be a perfect deluge," Gandhi said.
    
"If you want to give a message again to the West, it must be a message of love; it must be a message of truth," The Mahatma said.