Arun Gandhi's new office still looks unsettled. There are boxes to be unpacked and books to be stored. Large framed prints of Gandhi's famous grandfather, Mohandas K. Gandhi, sit on the floor, leaning against the wall. The images of the bony little man in wire-rimmed glasses, known to the world as Mahatma Gandhi, are a strong reminder of his iconic stature. Gandhi's face, like Bob Marley's and John Lennon's, is oddly familiar, even though he has been dead for more than 50 years.

The office houses the Mohandas K. Gandhi Institute for Peace and Nonviolence, founded in Memphis, Tennessee, by Arun Gandhi and his late wife, Sunanda, and now located in the University of Rochester's Wilson Commons. Arun Gandhi is Mahatma Gandhi's grandson, with whom he lived as a young boy in Durban, South Africa. Arun Gandhi remembers his grandfather as a soft-spoken man, often sitting on the floor spinning cotton into thread.

"He was quite fond of spinning, as we used to call it, and we would go over my lessons," Arun says.

Arun Gandhi lived in South Africa until 1956, moved to India and worked as a journalist, and in 1987 came to the US to work on a research project. The topic: color prejudice in South Africa, caste prejudice in India, and racism in the US. For Arun, the subject had a personal relevance, and not only because of his grandfather. He had met his wife Sunanda in India, and his hope was to return to South Africa to live. South Africa's apartheid government refused to admit his Indian wife.

When Arun Gandhi's mother died in 1988, he returned to South Africa for the funeral. And he found that the institute his grandfather had founded to promote nonviolence, the Phoenix Ashram of South Africa, had been destroyed.

"My father also spent his entire life there teaching nonviolence," he says, "but it was in total ruins." The apartheid government had instigated white South Africans to destroy it.

It was, he says, "a double tragedy for me - having just lost my mother, then seeing all of the work my grandfather and father had put into it destroyed."

Convinced that he had an obligation "to carry on the work that was so dear to them," he attempted to re-establish the institute in South Africa. "But for obvious reasons," he says, "the South African government at the time would not hear of it."

"I talked with many friends," he says, "and they helped me to realize that it was needed here as much as it was there." He was living in Memphis at the time, he says, and officials at Christian Brothers University invited him to open his institute on their campus. In 1991, Arun and Sunanda founded the Mohandas K. Gandhi Institute for Peace and Nonviolence. Its mission, he says, has been "to inform the younger generation in particular what this philosophy is about and why it should be a part of our lives."

"For several generations now," he says, "we have been inundated with violence to such an extent that it has become a force in our culture and an integral part of our lives. Our language, our images, our relationships with each other - you know, nearly everything about us is being influenced by this culture of violence. And that is slowly but surely destroying us."

"I believe that needs to be reversed," he says, "and the only way that we can do that is through teaching nonviolence."

His grandfather, Arun says, is often remembered for his role in guiding India to independence from Britain's colonial occupation. But it was his concern for human rights, equality, and nonviolence that consumed much of his life's work. And it is this side of Mahatma Gandhi that is the basis of the institute's work.

"There is nothing we can't accomplish, no problem so great, that we can't learn something from sitting down and talking to one another," Arun says. "Resorting to violence as a way to resolve differences is an act of desperation that destroys the individual who commits the violence as much as it inflicts pain and suffering on the victim."

Through the institute, Gandhi has talked to college students and world leaders, visited prisons, and worked with neighborhood groups in US cities, carrying on his grandfather's work. It is, he says, his duty.

When his wife's health deteriorated, the couple moved to Rochester in 2005 to be close to their daughter. And Arun found that he could not maintain the institute in Memphis and run it from here. Sunanda died in February of this year, and Arun has now brought the institute to the UR's River Campus.

In a recent interview, he talked about his grandfather, the institute, and the meaning of nonviolence. Following is an edited version of that interview.

City: Your grandfather studied many different religions. Is this where his belief in nonviolence originated?

Gandhi: He was a spiritual person, and he did draw from his interpretations of other religions, but he also drew from his own experiences. I have found that most people who have studied his work have focused on how he used this knowledge to try to resolve the political conflicts in South Africa and India. But not as many people have focused on how he used it to resolve personal conflicts.

To go one step further, we try to communicate that this is about much more than how to resolve a conflict. It is about how to live a nonviolent lifestyle, how to live with human dignity.

You lived with your grandfather for part of your childhood. What was he like as a grandfather? What impression did you have of him?

Oh, he was always Grandfather, never Mahatma. He was always approachable, very kind and considerate. He spent one hour every day with me, and he worked that into his schedule, and he would leave important meetings and interviews to spend his hour with me. Exactly at the end of the hour, he would go back to whatever it was he was doing.

He was a disciplined man, and he expected that from all of us, too. He had a chart on the wall, and from the moment I woke up in the morning to the time I went to bed, I had to know exactly what I was going to do all day. He felt that wasting time or killing time doing nothing was a luxury we could not afford. We must productively account for every minute.

Was that partly to counter the perceptions the British had about brown-skinned people?

Most definitely. It was something he believed, but he was also keenly aware of the color of his skin.

What kinds of things did you do together during that hour?

Well, we used to spin together. There were many stories that came out of that time together, stories about things he wanted me to know. But he was also just interested in me as a person.

He was concerned with human rights before we even used that expression.

Yes, he was deeply concerned about the treatment of others, compassion for others. And he was concerned about acts of violence, not just toward people, but violence against the environment, violence against animals, violence against children.

There are some accounts that Gandhi influenced many people, including Martin Luther King, Jr. But who influenced him?

It's a difficult question to answer. His mother was a deeply spiritual person, so he may have been influenced by her. But as far as his philosophy of nonviolence goes, some of this originated when he was thrown off that train in South Africa in 1892 within a week of his arrival in that country. And when he went and talked to other people about it, he found that they were afraid. They had all resigned themselves to apartheid and would say, If the white man doesn't want us to go there, then we won't go there. It's that simple.

But Grandfather felt that this was a very negative way of dealing with things. You can't just accept injustice, and he felt the best way of handling it was through nonviolent protests.

It was coincidence that the first protest in South Africa was something he called "civil disobedience." He had not read the works of Thoreau until he went to prison, and he was happy to know that such an eminent person thought the way he did. Then he began to read Tolstoy, who wrote about passive resistance. And the more he thought about it, he began to feel that this was about more than conflict resolution. This was about humanity and what kind of world we want to live in.

His philosophy of nonviolence, though brilliant, seems like something from another era. Can it work today?

I think it can work at any time providing we really understand the principles of nonviolence. A lot of people think that they are living a nonviolent life. But just because we are not fighting in streets or physically beating people up, that doesn't mean that we are nonviolent. We practice violence in many different ways. Take, for example, something he called passive violence. If we see something that is unjust happening to someone else, we can walk by and pretend it doesn't matter because it is not happening to us, or we can recognize that we have a duty to oppose it.

When we or others are forced to comply with something that is unjust, it is our duty to oppose it. We must oppose it even though it may cause us to suffer, because through our suffering we can show others the mistake they are making.

Passive violence can also take the form of allowing our anger to divide one another. Take for example, President Bush and his statement after 9/11. He told the world, "You are either with us, or you are against us," dividing the people of the world into friends and foes. Grandfather never did this. He never divided the people. He never called the British our enemy. And he did not allow others to talk that way, either. He said, They are our friends, and we must show them that they are misguided.

It's striking when you think about it that here is Gandhi leading India to independence at the same time that Great Britain is fighting Hitler and Japan is eyeing Asia.

Well, to be fair, he had started the campaign for independence from Britain much earlier. But you're right. It's quite ironic that he is the protagonist for nonviolence while the world is going up in flames.

And remember, too, it was his experience in an earlier war in South Africa that shocked him. He saw how war dehumanizes us. When the whites, mostly South Africans, were fighting the Zulus, my grandfather formed an ambulance corps. And he saw how they were shooting them for fun, for sport, like animals in the wild. It horrified him to see what was happening to the Zulus, but it was just as disturbing for him to see what was happening to the white soldiers.

Violence ultimately robs us of our humanity.

Based on your understanding of Gandhi's work and your own work, do you think that humans are predisposed or somehow genetically coded for violence? Or do you think it is environmental conditioning, something we learn?

I don't believe violence is natural. I think what is natural is anger. Violence occurs when we fail to learn the right way to deal with our anger. Anger can be used in a positive and constructive way. Grandfather liked to compare it to electricity.

Americans seem to have such a large appetite for violence. I wonder if you encounter people in your lectures who may see nonviolence as weakness?

See, violence gets quick results. You can kill a person and it looks like you've solved the problem, but violence doesn't result in resolution. The conflict often remains. To give you an example: We are constantly reassured by politicians that we can counter violence in society by enacting harsher laws and locking more people up in prisons. But really, violence is control by fear. In a nonviolent society, we don't control people through fear.

Enacting ever harsher laws inevitably leads to building more prisons. Why aren't we spending more time working with people to educate them, transform them with skills and understanding so they can come back into society? Instead, we focus on punishment, another form of violence that must keep escalating. Punishment teaches nothing. It just makes them hardened criminals.

I have worked in a lot of prisons, and I am constantly asked by prisoners: "Why should we change? We have been brought into the prison system, and we are blacklisted. Society has condemned us. Even if we are saints in here, no one cares. Society will never accept us; we are finished." And my answer to them is that you are not doing it to redeem yourself for society's sake. You are doing it for yourself.

In the last few years, we have seen more attention given to stopping domestic violence and bullying in schools. Yet we still see these incredible acts of violence in schools, the workplace, and in our neighborhoods.

This goes back to what Gandhi was saying. This is not only about conflict resolution. This is about our respect for life. If we don't want to change our lifestyle, I don't see how we can change some of this. If you don't live what you want others to learn, it is not going to change anything. If we tell our children, "You must do this," but they see us living a certain way, or they go out into society and they see something different, what should we expect?

We are teaching our children that in order to be successful, they must get to the top of the ladder. More and more, it doesn't matter how, just get to the top by any means possible. So we are increasingly teaching our children to be selfish, to go out and grab as much as possible. "You are entitled to it." It's jungle law. The seeds are planted in childhood.

How would you apply these principles to the Middle East? How would you convince someone not to be a suicide bomber?

I was in Israel and Palestine in 2004, and it turns out I was the one of the last foreigners to meet Yasser Arafat. The discussion I had with him was: I don't see the point that you have been trying to work on all of these years. What you have done is play right into the hands of Israel. You have reacted with violence, and they can bring you before the world stage and project you as terrorists. The work you do, the suicide bombers, that is not martyrdom. That is plain and simple terrorism. You are taking war into people's living rooms. It's defeating your own purpose. Instead of gaining the sympathy of the world, you are gaining the hatred of the world. People say Israel is justified in crushing you.

So he said, "What would you do if you were in my place? What would you do nonviolently to change this situation?" I said, "You have at least 500,000 refugees languishing in Amman, Jordan. I have visited them, and they want to return to their homeland and live a normal life." I said, "What would happen if you and your leadership went there and rallied these people in a nonviolent manner? No guns, no weapons, no police or military protection. It would be just a simple statement that says, We are men, women, and children, and we intend to march from Jordan to Palestine, West Bank, and establish our homes there peacefully. If you did that, do you think that the Israeli army would shoot down a half a million unarmed people walking to their homeland? Your battle would be won.

This is what Gandhi did. He didn't have any weapons. He just told the British, I am marching to the sea to make salt. There were no weapons, not a single shot. What could the British do? It was over.

What happened?

I got a call that night that he wanted me to speak to the Parliament the next morning, which I did. But there were quite a few people there wedded to violence.

Similarly, I talked to members of the Israeli Parliament. And they were concerned about security, which is natural. Every country is concerned with its security. But the best way to create security is to build friendships with your neighbors.

Closer to home, a few months ago you met with people in one of the city neighborhoods that have been dealing with shootings. What were you thinking as you spoke to them, some of them family and friends of these young people who have been killed?

Rochester is our community. It belongs to all of us. We all have a stake in what happens here. And we need to understand what happens when we allow people to live in destitution and poverty.

I was troubled in some ways, because we can't turn to nonviolence teachings as a quick fix for conflict resolution, as we have talked about. If we really want to end the violence, we need to look at the conditions, the suffering that so many of these young people are experiencing. It is not enough just to say, You must not be violent. They already know this. But they also see the hypocrisy and the injustice of inferior housing, no education, no jobs, and no future.

We have to transform this. We have to do better. We need to look seriously at the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. We have to address the problems that cause this anger in them, not just how it impacts the rest of society. I have been all over the world, and I am convinced that people are not born as bad people. They are unfortunately born into bad situations, and without our help, it is difficult to see a way out.