Monday, April 28, 2008

Great Indian Personalities - Swami Dayanand Saraswati

About Dayanand Saraswati
The founder of Arya Samaj (the Society of Nobles), Swami Dayanand Saraswati was one of the greatest religious leaders ever born in India. He was responsible, to some an extent, in bringing back the age-old teaching tradition of 'Gurukul'. He advocated for the equal right of women and condemned practices such as untouchability, animal sacrifice, idol worship, etc. Early LifeSwami Dayanand Saraswati was born as 'Moolashankar' in Gujarat, in the year 1824. Even when he was a child, Swami Dayanand Saraswati had a keen and inquisitive mind. Once, Mool Shankar was keeping a fast on the Shivratri festival day, along with his entire family. They had to be awake throughout the night. At night, he saw a mouse dancing on the Shivalinga. Surprised at this incident, he asked his eldersBorn as Mool Shankar Tiwari to a pious Gujarati couple in 1824, Mool Shankar had an inquisitive mind, and a compassionate nature from his childhood. Once on a Shivaratri festival day, which is observed by fasting and keeping awake the whole night in obedience to Lord Shiva, he saw a mouse dancing on the Shivalinga idol. He tried to find out from elders why this "God Almighty" could not defend himself against the menace of a petty mouse, for which he was rebuked! The sudden death of a favorite uncle, and his beloved sister caused much turmoil in Mool Shankar. He became quite detached from the world, and one day left home, incognito in search of a guru. The search was long and arduous. Finally, at the age of thirty-six he found his mentor in Virajananda Saraswati, who was blind, but was a master of the ancient lore. The training was rigorous, and the guru was ruthless. But here was a disciple of a lifetime. As the teacher's fee (gurudakshina -- also has a sacred connotation in Hindu thought; it cannot be denied) he wanted his student to devote his life for the revival of Hinduism. The guru called him Dayananda.Philosophy of Swami Dayananda SaraswatiDayanand Sarasvati believed that the Vedas were perfect and infallible. Dayananda advocated the doctrine of karma, skepticism in dogma, and emphasised the ideals of brahmacharya (celibacy and devotion to God).Arya SamajArya Samaj or the 'Society of Nobles' is a Hindu reform movement, founded by Swami Dayanand Saraswati in the year 1875. The main principles, on which Arya Samaj is based, condemn…
Ancestor worship
Animal sacrifices
Caste system
Child marriages
Discrimination against women
Idol worship
Pilgrimages
Untouchability

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi Biography

Name: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Birth Date: October 2, 1869
Death Date: January 30, 1948
Place of Birth: Porbandar, India
Place of Death: Delhi, India
Nationality: Indian
Gender: Male
Occupations: reformer, lawyer

World of Sociology on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an revolutionary spiritual leader who used his influence for political and social reform. Although he held no governmental office, he was the prime mover in the struggle for India's independence. Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, a seacoast town north of Bombay. His wealthy family was of the Vaisya, or merchant, caste. He was the fourth child of Karamchand Gandhi, prime minister to the raja of three small city-states. Mohandas was married at thirteen by parental arrangement to a girl his own age, Kasturbai.
Leaving his wife, Gandhi went to England to study in 1888. In England he studied law but never completely adjusted to English lifestyle. He passed the bar on June 10, 1891, and sailed for Bombay. He attempted unsuccessfully to practice law in Rajkot and Bombay, then for a brief period served as lawyer for the prince of Porbandar.
In 1893 Gandhi represented a Moslem firm in Pretoria, capital of Transvaal in the Union of South Africa. A train incident in which he was asked by a white man to leave first-class seating led Gandhi to his work eradicating race prejudice, a cause that kept him in South Africa until 1914. Shortly after the train incident he called his first meeting of Indians in Pretoria and attacked racial discrimination.
Gandhi decided to buy a farm in Natal and return to a simpler life. He began to fast and in 1906 he became celibate after having fathered four sons. He also began to live a life of voluntary poverty. During this period Gandhi developed the concept of soul force, what he called "a quiet and irresistible pursuit of truth." Truth was Gandhi's chief concern, as reflected in the subtitle of his Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth . Truth for Gandhi was a principle which had to be discovered experimentally in each situation. Gandhi also felt the means necessarily shaped the ends.
In 1907 Gandhi urged all Indians in South Africa to defy a law requiring their registration and fingerprinting. He read Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience," which left a deep impression on him. He was influenced also by his correspondence with Leo Tolstoy in 1909-1910 and by John Ruskin's Unto This Last. By this time Gandhi had abandoned Western dress for Indian garb.
By the time he returned to India in 1915 Gandhi had become known as "Mahatmaji." Gandhi knew how to reach the masses and insisted on their resistance and spiritual regeneration. He spoke of a new, free Indian individual. He said India's shackles were self-made. Gandhi urged Indians to spin their own clothing rather than buy British goods. Spinning would create employment during the many annual idle months for millions of Indian peasants. He cherished the ideal of economic independence and identified industrialization with materialism.
In 1921 the Congress party again voted for a nonviolent disobedience campaign against the British whom Ghandi believed rendered India helpless. In 1922 Gandhi was tried and sentenced to six years in prison, but he was released two years later for an emergency appendectomy.
One form of passive resistance was the fast which Gandhi used increasingly. He undertook a 21-day fast to bring the Moslem and Hindu communities together. He also fasted in a strike of mill workers in Ahmedabad. Gandhi also developed the protest march. Countering British tax on salt for Indians, Gandhi's famous 24-day "salt march" to the sea led to a nationwide movement in illegal salt production and sale.
But Gandhi was not opposed to compromise. In 1931 he negotiated with Lord Irwin, a pact whereby civil disobedience was to be canceled, prisoners released, salt manufacture permitted on the coast, and Congress would attend the Second Round Table Conference in London.
Gandhi espoused improving the status of "untouchables," who Gandhi called children of God. On September 20, 1932, Gandhi began a fast to the death for these people, opposing a British plan for a separate electorate for them. Following the marriage of one of Gandhi's sons to a woman of another caste, Gandhi came to approve only intercaste marriages.
Gandhi devoted the years 1934 through 1939 to promotion of spinning, basic education, and Hindi as the national language. During these years Gandhi worked closely with Jawaharlal Nehru in the Congress Working Committee whom he designated as his successor.
England's entry into World War II brought mandated India's immediate involvement. Gandhi, in August 1942, proposed noncooperation, and Congress passed the "Quit India" resolution. Gandhi, Nehru, and other Congress leaders were imprisoned, sparking violence throughout India. When the British attempted to place the blame on Gandhi, he fasted three weeks in jail. He contracted malaria in prison and was released on May 6, 1944.
When Gandhi emerged from prison, he sought to avert creation of a separate Moslem state of Pakistan. Civil unrest regarding this matter resulted in Jinnah declaring August 16 "Direct Action Day," which initiated killings that left 5,000 dead and 15,000 wounded in Calcutta alone. Violence spread through country. Aggrieved, Gandhi went to Bengal, saying, "I am not going to leave Bengal until the last embers of trouble are stamped out," but while he was in Calcutta 4,500 more were killed in Bihar. Gandhi, now 77, warned that he would fast to death. Either Hindus and Moslems would learn to live together or he would die. The situation there calmed, but rioting continued elsewhere.
In March 1947 the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, arrived in India charged with taking Britain out of India by June 1948. Gandhi, despairing because his nation was not responding to his plea for peace and brotherhood, refused to participate in the independence celebrations on August 15, 1947. On September 1, 1947, after a Hindu mob broke into the home where he was staying in Calcutta, Gandhi began to fast which led to Hindu and Moslem leaders promising no more killings.
On January 13, 1948, Gandhi began his last fast in Delhi, praying for Indian unity. On January 30, as he was attending prayers, he was shot and killed by Nathuram Godse, a 35-year old editor of a Hindu Mahasabha extremist weekly in Poona.

Encyclopedia of World Biography on Vivekananda

Encyclopedia of World Biography on Vivekananda
Vivekananda of Calcutta (1863-1902) was an Indian reformer, missionary, and spiritual leader who promulgated Indian religious and philosophical values in Europe, England, and the United States, founding the Vedanta Society and the Ramakrishna mission.

Vivekananda was born in Calcutta of high-caste parents. His family name was Narendranath ("son of the lord of man") Datta. His father was a distinguished lawyer, and his mother a woman of deep religious piety. The influence of both parental figures clearly affected Vivekananda's early life and mature self-conception. He was a fun-loving boy who also showed great intellectual promise in the humanities, music, the sciences, and languages at high school and college. At the age of 15 he had an experience of spiritual ecstasy which served to reinforce his latent sense of religious calling--through he was openly skeptical of traditional religious practices. He joined the liberal Hindu reforming movement, the Brahmo Samaj (Association of God). But his deeper religious aspirations were still unsatisfied.
In 1881 Vivekananda met the great Hindu saint Ramakrishna, who recognized the young man's immense talents and finally persuaded him to join his community of disciples. After Ramakrishna's death in 1885, Vivekananda assumed leadership of the Ramakrishna order. He prepared the disciples for extensive missionary work, which he himself undertook throughout India--preaching both on the spiritual uniqueness of Indian civilization and on the need for massive reforms, especially the alleviation of the poverty of the Indian masses and the dissolution of caste discrimination. In 1893 his fame and brilliance gained him the nomination as Indian representative to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago.
Vivekananda's successes there led to an extended lecture tour. He stressed the mutual relevance of Indian spirituality and Western material progress--both, in his view, were in need of each other. In Boston he found much in common with the philosophy of the transcendentalists--Emerson, Thoreau, and their followers. After touring England and Europe, Vivekananda returned to the United States, founding the Vedanta Society of New York in 1896. His lectures on the Vedanta philosophy and yoga systems deeply impressed William James, Josiah Royce, and other members of the Harvard faculty. Vivekananda then went back to India to promote the Ramakrishna mission and reforming activities.
Seemingly indefatigable, Vivekananda traveled once again to the United States, in 1898, where he established a monastic community, the Shanti Ashrama, on donated land near San Francisco. In 1900 he attended the Paris Congress of the History of Religions, speaking extensively on Indian religious and cultural history. He returned to India in December of that year, his health much undermined by his strenuous activities. His work is still maintained today internationally by the many organizations which he founded.

Swami Vivekananda

Vivekananda
VIVEKANANDA was the religious name of Narendranath Datta, or Dutt (1863–1902), a leading spokesman for modern Hinduism and neo-Vedānta in the late nineteenth century, and the founder of the Ramakrishna Mission in India and the Vedanta Society in the West.
Life
Narendranath came from a Bengali family, kāyastha by caste, that since the early nineteenth century had improved its social status through the process of westernization. Narendranath's great-grandfather had clerked for an English attorney in Calcutta, while his grandfather took the vow of saṃnyāsa (renunciation) and abandoned his family shortly after the birth of his son, Vishwanath, who would be Narendranath's father. Vishwanath became a prosperous lawyer in the Calcutta High Court. The Datta home was a cosmopolitan one, in which the worlds of Bengali Hinduism and Indo-Muslim culture merged with European learning. Vishwanath knew Sanskrit and Arabic, enjoyed the poems of Ḥāfiẓ, and read the Bible and Qurʾān for pleasure. Narendranath received schooling in both Bengali and English, eventually earning his bachelor's degree in 1884. Narendranath had a prodigious intellect; he loved to read, ranging over Sanskrit texts, English literature, philosophy, and history. His reading in the cultures of ancient Egypt, Rome, the Muslim world, and modern Europe all provided insights into the trajectory of Indian history and contributed to his understanding of the relationship between East and West.

Great Personalities - ARYABHATT

ARYABHATT (476 CE) : MASTER ASTRONOMER AND MATHEMATICIAN
Born in 476 CE in Kusumpur ( Bihar ), Aryabhatt's intellectual brilliance remapped the boundaries of mathematics and astronomy. In 499 CE, at the age of 23, he wrote a text on astronomy and an unparallel treatise on mathematics called "Aryabhatiyam." He formulated the process of calculating the motion of planets and the time of eclipses. Aryabhatt was the first to proclaim that the earth is round, it rotates on its axis, orbits the sun and is suspended in space - 1000 years before Copernicus published his heliocentric theory. He is also acknowledged for calculating p (Pi) to four decimal places: 3.1416 and the sine table in trigonometry. Centuries later, in 825 CE, the Arab mathematician, Mohammed Ibna Musa credited the value of Pi to the Indians, "This value has been given by the Hindus." And above all, his most spectacular contribution was the concept of zero without which modern computer technology would have been non-existent. Aryabhatt was acolossus in the field of mathematics.