Dr. E. Stanley Jones, author of ‘Mahatma Gandhi’, a book which has several instances of Gandhiji’s humour.“When I was staying with Mahatma Gandhi in his Ashram at Sabarmati every afternoon there would be a walk with the children and some of the rest of us in company with Mahatma Gandhi. He would always go to the jail gate. It was before the time of his arrest and he anticipated the arrest and so he played a game going ahead with the children and seeing who could touch the jail gate first. It was a kind of grim joke, the kind that you would expect him to give. But the humour of it caught me at the time and the more I think of it the more I see the humor of it.

“The Indian often says to you when he comes with a request: ‘You are my Ma Bap-my mother-father’. Gandhiji was the mother-father to a whole sub-continent. It was a serious business to be looked upon to solve the troubles of one fifth of the human race. And yet amid it all he was cheerful and at times playful. Lord Curzon said of Bishop Lefroy: ‘He had the zeal of a crusader, the spirit of a boy and the heart of a woman’. Mahatma Gandhi had all three, especially the spirit of a boy. Each evening at Sabarmati he would take an evening walk toward the jail a mile away with a troupe of children around him and some of us older ones trooping behind. He played a game with the children of seeing who could touch the jail gate first. And yet those of us who knew how events were shaping knew that he would soon be in that jail, or a similar one, as a prisoner. He made a joke of it! At evening prayers the little children would crawl all over him and hang about his neck while he was talking. It didn’t seem to embarrass him the slightest, nor did it embarrass the rest of us, for he seemed to be as simple as a child, and a child about his neck was as befitting as a beautiful ornament around the neck of a beautiful woman. They coincided. And yet he was a very wise child, for he was talking very profound things.”