"With him all work was service and all service was dedication. I have seen him spending much time in doling out food to inmates of the Ashram with his own trembling hands, both morning and evening" says Rameshwari Nehru.
Gandhi was essentially a man of service and not a politician. He identified himself with the masses by feeling and living their way. As the Indian villagers had no sufficient clothing, he took to the loin cloth as a measure of austerity and became in Churchillian words a "Naked Fakir"; he ate no rice or wheat because the teeming millions were half starved; his own abode was a mud hut because the villager had no house worth the name to live in.
If he had wanted, he could have lived in palatial buildings fit for monarchs, but he denied himself that luxury. His wants were few. He was an ascetic more out of choice than from compulsion.
In short, he was a model villager in his habits and mode of life though he had had an advanced education. He chose to live in the village of Segaon near Wardha in Central India. Once while he was in Segaon he had dysentery. If he had wanted, he could have had expert doctors at the shortest notice but he would have none of them. He took only country medicines. He said "to become a humble village servant he ought to be satisfied with remedies easily accessible to a village."
Gandhi was to meet the last Viceroy Lord Mountbatten at Simla on 30th March, 1947. He was asked to go by an aeroplane. He refused and went by train saying that he could not travel by a vehicle which millions of poor people could not use.
Gandhi travelled always by the lowest class in trains – Third class. One day when an extra compartment was reserved by his niece for Gandhi, he was very annoyed.
"An extra compartment is like a saloon. Remove all the luggage in this compartment and request the Station Master to see me at the next station. To travel with so much reserved accommodation is a criminal joke." The extra compartment was vacated by him at once.
To the Station Master he said: "She does not understand me fully yet. We have vacated the second compartment which may now be used for the passengers hanging on the footboards."