Latest revision as of 21:28, 8 September 2026

[edit] Auction prices

[edit] A Thought for the Day

Neelam.Raaj, August 21, 2026: The Times of India

A thought for the day isn’t just a WhatsApp forward; it can be worth a fortune if it’s written in Bapu’s hand. On Wednesday, Mahatma Gandhi’s daily thoughts sold for Rs 16.2 crore ($1.7 million) at a Saffronart auction, setting a world record for an Indian historical document.

“A Thought for the Day” comprises 688 dated reflections by Gandhi for his confidant, disciple, and publisher Anand T Hingorani, who was mourning the death of his wife Vidya. The document, offered as Lot 80, emerged as the highest-valued work in the auction and was bought by an Indian bidder.

Details

August 21, 2026: The Times of India

Spanning more than two decades, Hingorani’s archive brought together personal correspondence, handwritten reflections, photographs and objects such as a peti charkha that document not only defining moments in India’s freedom struggle, but also the friendship between Gandhi and Hingorani.

Dinesh Vazirani, co-founder of Saffronart, said the record price reflected a growing interest in collecting and preserving India’s cultural history. “Though these documents are not traditional art objects, the exceptional response to Lot 80 shows that Indians now value their cultural heritage much more and want to preserve it,” he said. Hingorani, as Gen Z would call it, was quite the Gandhi fanboy. According to author and historian Saaz Aggarwal, Hingorani began following Gandhi at the age of 13 and swore to wear only khadi. Nine years later, as a law student in Karachi, his admiration deepened when Gandhi visited Sindh in Feb 1929 They met in person at Lahore Congress of 1929, and Gandhi invited him to come and stay at Sabarmati Ashram.

Hingorani also marched with Gandhi to Dandi (the only Sindhi to do so). He went on to court arrest five times during the civil disobedience movement. Those periods of imprisonment left him hearing-impaired. Gandhi encouraged him to try various naturopathy treatments, but also joked that being deaf was not necessarily a bad thing.

In 1947, as independent India’s first govt was being formed, Gandhi instructed Jawaharlal Nehru to appoint Hingorani as a Cabinet minister, according to Aggarwal. Hingorani declined. Instead, he devoted himself to disseminating Gandhi’s ideas, eventually publishing more than 50 books on him and building an extensive repository of his writings — a legacy that, almost 80 years later, has created history in the auction market.