India, Oct. 2 -- Mahatma Gandhi was killed in January 1948. British literary giant George Orwell wrote an altogether brilliant essay - an obituary-style assessment - titled Reflections on Gandhi in January 1949. Orwell died in January 1950. The two years between those three Januarys saw a post-Partition India lose territory and population but gain a great Constitution that proclaimed it a Republic. A post-World War II Britain shrank dramatically as an empire but through the landmark London Declaration of 1949, became renewed as the Commonwealth of Nations. And the world as a whole, chastened by its searing experiences of the Holocaust and of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, came to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the UN. In his 1949 essay, Orwell wrote about the impact of Gandhi on the war-scorched world and asked, ".[T]he question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another?" And Orwell answered his own question like this: "These and kindred questions need discussion, and need it urgently, in the few years left to us before somebody presses the button and the rockets begin to fly. It seems doubtful whether civilisation can stand another major war, and it is at least thinkable that the way out lies through non-violence." To use two unlovely contemporary expressions that evoke laptops and fast-food joints, the keywords and takeaways from these lines of Orwell's are "before somebody presses the button", "rockets fly", and "way out is non-violence". Orwell was not one to be found saying so-and-so is the answer, or such and such is the solution. In his characteristically understated but unmistakable way, he said in what was almost a farewell essay that Gandhi's espousal of non-violent action to resist violence and evil had to be heard by the world that had just about survived an assault on its civility. The powerful Bertrand Russell-Albert Einstein Manifesto (1955), signed by nine other scientists, asking the leaders of States with nuclear weapons to renounce that path and "remember humanity, forget the rest" was still five years away from Orwell's essay. The essay can well be said to have paved the way for that seminal call. At the time Orwell wrote his essay, the world had 304 nuclear warheads, with Harry S Truman's US holding 299, and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union holding five. No other country had them. Today, nine countries in the world stock between them a total of 12,331 nuclear warheads. In order of stock, the top three are Vladimir Putin's Russia holding 5,499, Donald Trump's US with 5,277, and Xi Jinping's China holding 600. For some inexplicable reason, Emmanuel Macron's France is at number four, with 290 of them, all stored inside the country that Jean Paul Sartre called his, as did Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur. If Einstein would have shaken his great mane of a head in disbelief at the size of the US's nuclear arsenal today, Russell would have plucked his pipe out of his mouth and Orwell his cigarette to shout in dismay at the UK holding 225. Narendra Modi's India and goodness-knows-whose Pakistan hold 180 and 170 nuclear warheads respectively - totalling 350 - a good 125 more than the UK that once ruled them. India and Pakistan are the only members of the Commonwealth, besides the head of the Commonwealth, the UK itself, to hold nuclear weapons - certainly a dubious distinction. Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel has 90 that are not spoken of much by way of either confirmation or denial - mystification adding a twist to the wick. Kim Jong Un's North Korea, unlike Israel, is open about its stock, calling its 50 warheads its "shield and sword" - completing the list of nine. Putin's spokespersons have used the N-word more than once in the context of the war with Ukraine. Netanyahu's horrors in Palestine-Gaza apart, his actions against Iran have dangled the nuclear threat before the world. In 2024 and so far in 2025, nuclear arsenals in some countries have stirred within their casques as never before in the post-World War II era. Which brings us to the buttons Orwell spoke of. "Before somebody presses the button and the rockets begin to fly." That, of course, is how World War III may start. Or, perhaps a full dress rehearsal has started already? And now, there are non-nuclear buttons - biological, chemical, cyber, and AI - waiting to be but ever so lightly touched, let alone pressed. Is the world upset by this? Gandhi's truth would say, no it is not. It is going about its preoccupations with old festivals and new carnivals as if the planet has an eternity of joys ahead. That truth also says smaller buttons are being pressed, with rockets being fired not just to drop bombs that obliterate life but also to ignite hate and suspicion that intoxicate the spirit before they destroy the body. By whom? By us. Government leaders snapping at one another are backed by community leaders snapping in chorus, stoking fires that can detonate explosives that burn, spew acids that scar for life. Orwell ends his essay on Gandhi with these honest words: "One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claim himself, by the way) . but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!" He does not say "fragrance" - that would be for Gandhians to say. He says "smell" - that honest word. But the key word there is "clean". Return, clean and lean you! It will not be a happy return for you, I know. But by God and by Orwell, do return as some other person, an AI geek perhaps, an AI Einstein or Russell. Teach us how to say no to all old and new ways of deceit and deception, including those that AI will invent. But do return before the buttons are pressed and the rockets fly, above and inside us....