"Be ever ready to serve others with your efforts, emotions, or knowledge. Serve selflessly. Let it be an outpouring of your inner faculties in service at the feet of the Lord." Such encouragement from Pujya Gurudev Swami Chinmayananda inspired CORD (Chinmaya Organization for Rural Development) and the Chinmaya Mission Hospital in Bengaluru to become the service wings of Chinmaya Mission.
Chinmaya Seva is about service that empowers. The book's inspiring pages outline the evolution of CORD and its comprehensive and holistic rural development work in the villages spread over different states of India. The book also traces the eventful beginning and the activities of the Chinmaya Mission Hospital in Bengaluru.
What began in 1985 as a small community-based rural health project in Sidhbari, Himachal Pradesh, is now celebrated as CORD, a movement to work with the people, to walk with the people, and to serve the marginalized people in society in a comprehensive and integrated way. What started in the early 1960s as a small clinic in Bengaluru now brings exemplary yet accessible and affordable healthcare to all. The work and achievements of CORD and the Chinmaya Mission Hospital are offered as a heartfelt tribute to Gurudev.
Everyone wants to live happily. All of us work constantly toward this goal of happiness, and still we suffer. One reason for this unhappiness is that our idea of happiness is very individualistic: "If I am well off and have taken care of myself, I am happy." So long as we remain concerned with only ourselves, to some extent our life is comfortable, but we may not have experienced real happiness. Suppose you are healthy and doing well in your own home, but someone in the family is suffering - do you feel happy then? However, when everyone in your family is happy, then you feel, "Ah! I am happy!" That means, even if personally you are not facing any problem, you find it hard to experience joy when someone dear to you is suffering.
Similarly, when we live in a community, in a society, unless the society around us is happy, we cannot look just at our own prosperity and feel happy. We have to see that the world around us is also happy. A beautiful phrase in the Bhagavad-gita (Chapter 3, Verse 11) sums up this fundamental of universal happiness: "Cherishing each other, all attain the supreme good." This highlights the main principle of CORD and the Chinmaya Mission Hospital.
Rather than espousing any idea of superiority, or assuming an air of obliging someone less important, our work together must be done with humility, to serve with the attitude that our work is the worship of God. Many a time, we may have different notions about helping, as though we were superior, and our arrogance may increase. Or, if we just view the work as serving people, sometimes the feeling arises, "We are doing so much for them, but they don't even appreciate our work." However, when service is done as worship of God, such feelings have no place.
This book narrates the service (seva) activities of Chinmaya Mission. The first part of this book traces the evolution of CORD (Chinmaya Organization for Rural Development) and covers its comprehensive and holistic rural development work. The second part is dedicated to the inception and activities of the Chinmaya Mission Hospital. The setting of the first part is the rural landscape of India with its villages spread over different states, and the setting of the second part is an urban area in Bengaluru.
CORD works in the villages that are cut off from the mainstream of national development. Forty percent of rural India is remote and extremely backward. If we, at CORD, want to uplift the ignored rural population, we need to live with the people, work with the people, walk with the people, as well as harness their insights and wisdom. CORD focuses on simple solutions to the multiple complex issues affecting the lives of the poor through people-centered and people-driven, broad-scoped, and sustainable approaches.
In 1985, with the blessings of Param Pujya Gurudev, CORD began its integrated rural development work in Sidhbari, Himachal Pradesh, under the aegis of the Chinmaya Tapovan Trust, as Chinmaya Rural Primary Health Care and Training Centre (CRPHC&TC). Eighteen years later, in 2003, Pujya Guruji, Swami Tejomayananda, established CORD as a separate trust to replicate that rural development work nationally. Work began in Odisha and Tamil Nadu in 2005. CRPHC&TC became the nucleus of CORD, and its ongoing activities were incorporated within CORD. Throughout the remainder of this book, for practical reasons as well as for the ease of the reader, the work carried out prior to 2003 by CRPHC&TC (CORD's predecessor organization) will be included within the activities of CORD as if it were one continuing organization.
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