Gandhi led India to freedom from British Rule in 1947. He is hailed as the Father of the Nation. Crusader for human rights and liberty, thinker, writer, reformer, apostle of truth and non-violence (ahimsa), Gandhi succeeded in uniting millions of people of all faiths across India in a mass movement of civil disobedience. On Gandhi's seventeenth birthday, Albert Einstein wrote, "Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth".