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"Gandhi first read the subversive masterwork of political economy by John Ruskin in 1904, during a train trip in South Africa where he was living at the time.

"The book was impossible to lay aside, once I had begun it," wrote the progenitor of the non-violence resistance movement years later in his autobiography.

"It gripped me. Johannesburg to Durban was a twenty-four hours' journey. The train reached there in the evening. I could not get any sleep that night. I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book," Gandhi wrote.

"I believe that I discovered some of my deepest convictions in this great book," he wrote, adding the work "captured me and made me transform my life.""