India after Gandhi” has been so obsessed with Gandhi that we belittle everyone’s stature in front of the father of our nation. I remember in one of my favorite movies, the actor tells his friend that if they go to jail, they will be respected like Gandhi and their faces will be printed on the currency notes. Seriously, the writer of the movie needs to be reminded that no matter how much a person does, he will never be close to the “greatness” of Gandhi and will never get his face on the currency note.
In India, a person’s greatness is counted only after Gandhi. A popular Indian weekly even created an opinion poll titled “Greatest Indian after Gandhi”. Really! Is nobody even equal to Gandhi?.
I am not, in any way, undermining the greatness of Gandhi ji. I just want say that India has been blessed by many great people who deserve equal respect and stature. These people are equally patriotic as Gandhi. Only thing I am saying that they should be remembered and revered as Gandhi and their faces should also appear on the currency notes.
Swami Vivekananda:
Swami Vivekananda is the legendary spiritual personality who brought international limelight to the glory and wisdom of India. His historic speech at the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893 wherein he started with the opening statement, “Sisters and Brothers of America…” will be remembered forever. He possessed a fiery flame of renunciation and inspired countless people to wake up to the higher purpose of life.
Swami Vivekananda was born in Calcutta as Narendranath. He was educated in the prominent British-run schools of the time like the Presideny College and Scottish Church College in Calcutta. At a young age he began the inquiring about God and this brought him in touch with Brahma Samaj of Sri Keshav Chandra Sen. Possessed with a very sharp intellect, he was not satisfied with the Samaj and searched for a man who saw God and who could show him God. This search led him to Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa of Dakshineshwar.
Narendra met Ramakrishna for the first time in November 1881. He asked Ramakrishna the same old question he has asked others so often, “Mahashaya, have you seen god?.” The instantaneous answer from Ramakrishna was, “Yes, I see God, just as I see you here, only in a much intenser sense. God can be realized,” he went on “one can see and talk to Him as I am seeing and talking to you. But who cares? People shed torrents of tears for their wife and children, for wealth or property, but who does so for the sake of God? If one weeps sincerely for Him, he surely manifests Himself.” Narendra was astounded and puzzled. He could feel the man’s words were honest and uttered from depths of experience. He started visiting Ramakrishna frequently. At first he did not believe that such a plain man could’ve seen God but gradually he started having faith in what Ramkrishna said.
During the course of five years of his training under Ramakrishna, Narendra was transformed from a restless, puzzled, impatient youth to a mature man who was ready to renounce everything for the sake of God-realization. After the passing away of Sri Ramakrishna, Narendra and a core group of Ramakrishna’s disciples took vows to become monks and renounce everything. In July 1890, he set out for a long journey, without knowing where the journey would take him. The journey that followed took him to the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent. He reached Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent on 24 December 1892. There, he swam across the sea and started meditating on a lone rock. He thus meditated for three days and said later that he meditated about the past, present and future of India. The rock went on to become the Vivekananda memorial at Kanyakumari.
Swami Vivekananda successfully introduced yoga and Vedanta to the West and lectured around America introducing them. After four years of constant touring, lecturing and retreats in the West, he came back to India in the year 1897. He founded one of the world’s largest charitable relief missions, the Ramakrishna Mission and reorganized the ancient Swami order by founding one of the most significant and largest monastic orders in India, the Ramakrishna Math.
Swamiji has written a number of scholarly works on Yoga and Vedanta that remain as invaluable gems of wisdom for spiritual seekers of all times.
Bhagat Singh:
Bhagat Singh gave a new direction to revolutionary movement in India during independence struggle, formed ‘Naujavan Bharat Sabha’ to spread the message of revolution in Punjab, formed ‘Hindustan Samajvadi Prajatantra Sangha’ along with Chandrasekhar Azad to establish a republic in India, assassinated police official Saunders to avenge the death of Lala Lajpat Rai, dropped bomb in Central Legislative Assembly along with Batukeshwar Dutt.
Bhagat Singh was one of the most prominent faces of Indian freedom struggle. He was a revolutionary way ahead of his times. By Revolution he meant that the order of things prevailed at that time, which was based on injustice must change. Bhagat Singh studied the European revolutionary movement and was greatly attracted towards socialism. He realised that the overthrow of British rule should be accompanied by the socialist reconstruction of Indian society and for this political power must be seized by the workers.
Though portrayed as a terrorist by the British, Sardar Bhagat Singh was critical of the individual terrorism which was prevalent among the revolutionary youth of his time and called for mass mobilization. Bhagat Singh gave a new direction to the revolutionary movement in India. He differed from his predecessors on two counts. Firstly, he accepted the logic of atheism and publicly proclaimed it. Secondly, until then revolutionaries had no idea of post-independence society. Their immediate goal was destruction of the British Empire and they had no inclination to work out a political alternative. Bhagat Singh, because of his interest in studying and his keen sense of history gave revolutionary movement a goal beyond the elimination of the British. A clarity of vision and determination of purpose distinguished Bhagat Singh from other leaders of the National Movement. He emerged as the only alternative to Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, especially for the youth.
Mother Teresa:
Mother Teresa was born on August 26, 1910 in Skopje, the current capital of the Republic of Macedonia, which was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time of her birth and was conquered by the Kingdom of Serbia in 1912, when she was two years old. On August 27, 1910, a date frequently mistaken for her birthday, she was baptized as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. Mother Teresa’s parents, Nikola and Drana Bojaxhiu, were of Albanian descent; her father was an entrepreneur, who worked as a construction contractor and a trader of medicines and other goods. The Bojaxhius were devoutly Catholic and Nikola Bojaxhiu was deeply involved in the local church as well as in city politics as vocal proponents of Albanian independence.
In 1919, when Mother Teresa was only eight years old, her father suddenly fell ill and expired. While the cause of his death remains unknown, many have speculated that political enemies poisoned him. In the aftermath of her father’s death, Mother Teresa became extraordinarily close to her mother, a pious and compassionate woman who instilled in her daughter a deep commitment to charity. Although by no means wealthy, Drana Bojaxhiu extended an open invitation to the city’s destitutes to dine with her family. “My child, never eat a single mouthful unless you are sharing it with others,” she counseled her daughter. When Mother Teresa asked, who the people eating with them were, her mother uniformly responded, “Some of them are our relations, but all of them are our people.”
Mother Teresa attended a convent-run primary school and then a state-run secondary school. As a girl Mother Teresa sang in the local Sacred Heart choir and was often asked to sing solos. The congregation made an annual pilgrimage to the chapel of the Madonna of Letnice atop Black Mountain in Skopje and it was on one such trip at the age of twelve that Mother Teresa first felt a calling to the religious way of life. Six years later, in 1928, an 18-year-old Agnes Bojaxhiu decided to become a nun and set off for Ireland to join the Loreto Sisters of Dublin. It was there that she took the name Sister Mary Teresa after Saint Theresa of Lisieux. A year later, she traveled on to Darjeeling, India for the novitiate period; in May 1931, Mother Teresa made her First Profession of Vows. Afterward she was sent to Calcutta, where she was assigned to teach at Saint Mary’s High School for Girls, a school runs by the Loreto Sisters and dedicated to teaching girls from the city’s poorest Bengali families. Mother Teresa learned to speak both Bengali and Hindi fluently as she taught geography and history and dedicated herself to alleviating the girls’ poverty through education.
On May 24, 1937, she took her Final Profession of Vows to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience. As was the custom for Loreto nuns, she took on the title of “mother” upon making her final vows and thus became known as Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa continued to teach at Saint Mary’s, and in 1944 she became the school’s principal. Through her kindness, generosity and unfailing commitment to her students’ education , She sought to lead them to a life of devotion to Christ. “Give me the strength to be ever the light of their lives, so that I may lead them at last to you,” she wrote in prayer.
However, on September 10, 1946, Mother Teresa experienced a second calling that would forever transform her life. She was riding a train from Calcutta to the Himalayan foothills for a retreat when Christ spoke to her and told her to abandon teaching to work in the slums of Calcutta aiding the city’s poorest and sickest people. “I want Indian Nuns, Missionaries of Charity, who would be my fire of love amongst the poor, the sick, the dying and the little children,” she heard Christ say to her on the train that day. “You are I know the most incapable person — weak and sinful but just because you are that — I want to use You for My glory. Wilt thou refuse?”
Since Mother Teresa had taken a vow of obedience, she could not leave her convent without official permission. After nearly a year and a half of lobbying, in January 1948 she finally received approval from the local Archbishop Ferdinand Perier to pursue this new calling. That August, wearing the blue and white sari that she would always wear in public for the rest of her life, she left the Loreto convent and wandered out into the city. After six months of basic medical training, she voyaged for the first time into Calcutta’s slums with no more specific goal than to aid “the unwanted, the unloved, the uncared for.”
Mother Teresa quickly translated this somewhat vague calling into concrete actions to help the city’s poor. She began an open-air school and established a home for the dying destitute in a dilapidated building she convinced the city government to donate for her cause. In October 1950, she won canonical recognition for a new congregation, the Missionaries of Charity, which she founded with only twelve members — most of them former teachers or pupils from St. Mary’s School. As the ranks of her congregation swelled and donations poured in from India and across the globe, the scope of Mother Teresa’s charitable activities expanded exponentially. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, she established a leper colony, an orphanage, a nursing home, a family clinic and a string of mobile health clinics.
In February 1965, Pope John Paul VI bestowed the Decree of Praise upon the Missionaries of Charity, which prompted Mother Teresa to begin expanding internationally. By the time of her death in 1997, the Missionaries of Charity numbered over 4,000 — in addition to thousands more lay volunteers — with 610 foundations in 123 countries on all seven continents.
In 1971, Mother Teresa traveled to New York City where she opened a soup kitchen as well as a home to care for those infected with HIV/AIDS. The next year she went to Beirut, Lebanon, where she crossed frequently between Christian East Beirut and Muslim West Beirut to aid children of both faiths. Mother Teresa has received various honors for her tireless and effective charity. She was awarded ” Bharat Ratna,” the highest honor bestowed on Indian civilians, as well as the now-defunct Soviet Union’s Gold Medal of the Soviet Peace Committee. Then, in 1979, Mother Teresa won her highest honor when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her work “in bringing help to suffering humanity.”
After several years of deteriorating health in which she suffered from heart, lung and kidney problems, Mother Teresa left for heavenly abode on September 5, 1997 at the age of 87. Since her death, Mother Teresa has remained in the public spotlight.
Mother Teresa once said: “By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world.”
Note: This list is not complete. It just shows my personal views. No offense intended to anybody.
