OMAHA - Rajmohan Gandhi visited Omaha to give a lecture and receive the Creighton presidential medallion.

Even with Mohandas K. Gandhi as a grandfatherly example, historian and human rights advocate Rajmohan Gandhi can be tempted to despair by the state of the world decades after the Mahatma led India to freedom through nonviolent resistance.

But Gandhi finds reasons for hope and faith in events large and small, he said in an interview Monday before delivering a lecture at Creighton University.

"The temptations of despair are very frequent," said Gandhi, a former member of India's Parliament who is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "But I do see the daily evidence of the triumph of goodness....