Mohandas Gandhi

30 years of slow campaigning, then a 240-mile walk to pick up illegal salt — and an empire began to come apart.

Gandhi arrived in India in 1915 already 46 years old, with two decades of South African organizing behind him. He spent the next 15 years building discipline — ashrams, vows, hand-spinning, the patient mass-training of satyagraha — before any of it touched the Raj. The Salt March of 1930 was the result: a 24-day walk in which he and 78 followers covered 240 miles to the sea and picked up a fistful of salt, deliberately breaking the British monopoly. The act was symbolic, the timing was 30 years in the making, and the empire never recovered. Independence came another 17 years later. He changed himself first — clothing, diet, vows — then asked others to follow. The transformation was self-first, then societal, and slow on both ends.