In the course of a short life of thirty-nine years, Swami Vivekananda came to be regarded as the patriot–saint of modern India. Despite all that has been written about his life and his epoch-making address at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago, 1893, Swami Vivekananda remains a paradox: much is known about him, but very little is understood about the man and his relevance to our own troubled times. In Swami Vivekananda: The Living Vedanta, Chaturvedi Badrinath looks behind the iconic fa?ade, seeking to liberate Vivekananda from the confines of the worship room. He examines the various facets of a man who was as much at ease with philosophical discourse as he was with cooking; whose childlike love for ice cream went hand in hand with his stature as a prophet. The author also throws light on the various relationships that shaped Swamiji’s philosophy of Vedanta and formed the core of his teaching—with his spiritual guru Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, his mother Bhubaneswari Devi, and his many followers in the West, mostly women, who became central to his life and work. Well researched and brimming with a wealth of detail, Swami Vivekananda: The Living Vedanta offers an unforgettable insight into the life and times of this renaissance figure—a one who was the very embodiment of the Vedanta that he preached.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Chaturvedi Badrinath
Chaturvedi Badrinath was born in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh. A philosopher, he was a member of the Indian Administrative Service, 1957-89, and served in Tamil Nadu for thirty-one years (1958-89). He was a Homi Bhabha Fellow from 1971 to 1973. As a Visiting Professor at Heidelberg University, 1971, he gave a series of four seminars on Dharma and its application to modern times. Invited by a Swiss foundation, Inter-Cultural Cooperation, he spent a year in Europe in 1985-86. In 1985 he was a main speaker at the European Forum, Alpbach, Austria, and at a conference of scientists at Cortona, Italy. From 1989 onwards, for four years, the Times of India published his articles on Dharma and human freedom every fortnight. He was a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, during1990-92. He was one of the two main speakers at Inter-Religious Federation for World Peace conference, 1994, Seoul, South Korea. In 1999, at Weimar, he gave a talk on Goethe and the Indian Philosophy of Nature; and contributed to an inter-religious conference at Jerusalem with the Dalai Lama. He was one of the two main speakers at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation symposium on 'civilizational dialogue', Tokyo, 2002. Chaturvedi Badrinath's other published books are Dharma, India and the World Order: Twenty-one Essays (1993), Introduction to the Kama Sutra (1999), Finding Jesus in Dharma: Christianity in India (2000), and "The Mahabharata”An Inquiry into the Human Condition (2006). He lives in Pondicherry.
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