SWAMI VIVEKANANDA---12 JANUARY, 2026

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA---12 JANUARY, 2026

Today is 12th January. It is the birthday of Swami Vivekananda. It is also the National Youth Day. Since 1985 the Government of India has officially been observing Swamiji's birthday as such because he was the greatest youth icon this country has produced in modern times. His life and message are a beacon for our youth. But how did his life go? Let us delve into it.

     

      Born Narendranath Datta to Bhuvaneshwari Devi and Vishwanath Datta in Simulia in North Kolkata in 1863, the boy, brilliant in many a discipline, grew up to manhood a seeker of the ultimate spiritual truth, God. He met his Guru, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, at Dakshineshwar in 1881 and studied religion and philosophy nearly five years under him till his preceptor passed away in 1886. From his Guru he learnt that all religions contained a measure of truth which could advance aspirants of varying temperaments and levels of spiritual evolution unto the ultimate Truth, God. Also that all beings were divine under their human or animal cover. This divinity had to be reached and made manifest in life through austerity, spiritual practice and worshipful service to all. 

     

       Between 1887 and 1893 Swamiji wandered the face of India, a nameless mendicant monk to discover the soul of India. Finally in 1892 he dared the ocean to swim to the last rock of India amidst the ocean and meditated there for three days and three nights to see as if on a silver screen the past greatness of India, her present abject degradation and the future glory of emerging India.

    

        In 1893 Swamiji set sail for Chicago, USA, where he attended the World Parliament of Religions which he took by storm with his inaugural address. Thereafter Swamiji was a celebrity in America and after conducting a rigorous series of lectures for three years and half, he returned to India in 1897 to found the Ramakrishna Mission. 

    

       Back home he travelled from Colombo to Almora to deliver a memorable series of soul-stirring patriotic lectures which awakened the sleeping Indians unto revolutionary activity for the country's freedom and inspired others unto serving the poor and the weak to lend them self-assurance and strength. Great freedom fighters have all testified to the debt they owed to Swamiji. They are Netaji, Gandhiji, Aurobindo Ghosh, Rajagopalachari, Jawaharlal Nehru, Bagha Jatin, Masterda Surya Sen, Hemchandra Ghosh and a host of others. 

    

       Swamiji visited the West a second time in 1899 and after a stay of a year and a half returned to breathe his last in his motherland at his residence in Belur Math on the 4th of July, 1902. By then, by his own admission, he had left behind spiritual food for the next 1500 years for the sustenance of humanity. 

   

        Now what was that spiritual food? In the words of his French biographer, the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, Vivekananda was energy personified and action was his message to man. Vivekananda's words were like Beethovenic symphonies, like the march of Handel choruses, the sage himself being the highest human harmony of the diverse forces that battled for supremacy in his storm-tossed being.

    

        Now the message of this Messiah of Man.

1. Man, you are divine. Manifest your divinity by the pursuit of knowledge, devotion, work or mind-control, by one or multiple or all of these, and be free.

2. Purity is the key and cornerstone of both religion and education.

3. Character is the bedrock of spirituality and of all of life's endeavours. 

4. We, Hindus, not only tolerate all religions but we also accept all religions as true.

5. Help and not fight. Assimilation and not destruction. Harmony and peace and not dissension.

        It is for us to heed his message and build a healthy, harmonic humanity devoid of violence and war, a wholesome world where the finest elements of manhood and of womanhood will equally manifest to further human evolution along the channel divine. 🕉 

Written by Sugata Bose