So. I was in the TV room in my home, pouring salt onto my vegan masala fry with heirloom tomato fritters. When who should come flying in? Yup. Ye Olde Witch from next door with her false teeth clacking and her underarm skin flapping like bat wings.“Sorry, Aunty,” I say, as politely as I can, “NaCl is the sixth most abundant element on Earth. Not precious at all.” We just learned about it last week.Naturally, that just made her clack her teeth even louder and she launched: “You young people of today — blah-ti-blah-ti-blah-blah,” finishing with these words: “Have you even heard of the civil disobedience movement?”“The what?” I stop slurping my vanilla banana chill-zie to stare at the ugly old boom-bag. I mean, I take my Beagle-Dachshund mix to obedience classes but who ever heard of DISOBEDIENCE? As a movement? Some kinda dance?“What about satyagraha? What about khadi? What about the SALT MARCH?” she’s yapping on and on. “Do you even know what was risked, what was sacrificed in the name of…” Here, she picks up my innocent little packet of genuine maldon sea salt, which my cousin sent me straight from England, and throws it across the room (can you believe this?) but in the next instant, her eyes fill with tears and she whirls around, back to her belfry, farting all the way.I mean, phew, right? But. She’s totally destroyed my snack. So, I decide I have to know more. Just so that I can snark at her, the next time she attacks me and my snack.Story continues below this adPulling on my Time Traveler Togs, I punch in coordinates and speed off to ‘one century ago’. To a place where this thick, heavy cloth called khadi is being made. I choose Sabarmati Ashram as my location. Instead the Locator dumps me on some nameless dusty verandah at the back of an old bungalow. Like you see in the boringest slow-motion films. Sleepy mango trees, crows cawing. Bare mud, no grass. In the corner, crouched behind a big wooden wheel, is a small, dark-skinned woman. She’s wrapped in a thin cotton cloth, no blouse, nothing. With her right hand she turns the wheel and in her left, she holds a long white string.My SmartLocator has Info-Tips. They tell me that the yarn the woman is spinning is a protest. Against the foreign cloth that’s made from Indian cotton which has to be imported by Indians.(What? I mean, how unfair). The old dude with the round glasses and a cane, called Mahatma Gandhi, the one who’s on all our modern currency notes. He came up with the idea to fight the imports by spinning Indian yarn from Indian cotton. By hand.I’m standing on that verandah, wearing my little pink seersucker tube-top (from Hong Kong), with my cargo shorts (US) and my Chee-Ta sandals (Singapore cousins, thank you). The air is stickier than honey. But here, a woman sits spinning, a lone warrior against the mighty Empire. She looks so weak, so puny. Yet, all these many years later, what do we know about her? That she won. Armed with a thin cotton string, she, and millions like her, won against the Empire.Not gonna lie. Right that minute, my heart begins to break. But I hate crying, right? So I punch through some more coordinates and rush away to March 12, 1930.This time the Locator takes me straight to the Sabarmati Ashram. Mahatma Gandhi is surrounded by crowd of men and a few ladies. Everyone’s dressed in khadi, mostly in white. They’ve come from all over India. They’re protesting the imposition of a tax on salt. Yep, the sixth most common element on Earth. Imagine taxing THAT!Story continues below this adGandhi sets off at a mega-pace — like you wouldn’t believe! Olympic-level walker, with his spindly legs striding out, like the shafts of a machine. A giant machine. With hundreds and hundreds of legs. All the way from the Ashram to the sea shore at Navsari, almost 400 km away. When he’s there, he raises up a lump of muddy salt and declares: “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire…”And so, now, I’ve just returned from these two trips. Not gonna lie. I’m zombied-out. I’m thinking about imported stuff — like even the clothes I’m wearing, right, and the unfair taxes on basic stuff like salt.It’s hard to believe that the British really did that? I mean why? Today they’re all just cool and funny. How could they do that? It’s like the evil Empire in Star Wars. Except worse. Coz this stuff really happened.Also, it’s still happening. Seriously. Like all the stuff in my home. I’m sitting in our TV room and looking around. My skin is crawling. Everything’s imported. Even my Pringles. Except for this one rug on the floor. It’s handwoven. I know, coz my Mom made it, for a project, in college. Out of khadi yarn. It’s plain white. Totally threadbare. I go sit down on it. And think about disobedience.Manjula Padmanabhan is a writer and cartoonist