India's Vision of Samanvaya

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Born in the village of Trikkur, Kerala State, on December 15, 1908, Swami Ranganathananda joined the Ramakrishna Order, the international spiritual and cultural movement founded by Swami Vivekananda, at its branch in Mysore in 1926. He was formally initiated into Sannyasa in 1933 by Swami Shivananda, one of the eminent disciples of Sri Ramakrishna and the second President of the Order. After spending the first twelve years in the Order's branches in Mysore and Bangalore, the first six years of which as cook, dishwasher and house- keeper and later as warden of student's hostel, he worked as Secretary and librarian at the Ramakrishna Mission branch at Rangoon from 1939 to 1942, and thereafter as President of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, Karachi, from 1942 to 1948.

From 1949 to 1962, he worked as the Secretary of the New Delhi branch of the Mission, and from 1962 to 1967, he was the Secretary of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Culcutta, Director of its School of Humanistic and Cultural Studies, and Editor of its monthly journal.

From 1973 to 1993 he was President of Ramakrishna Math, Hyderabad. Now he is a Vice-President of world-wide Ramakrishna Math and Ramakrishna Mission and he continues to stay at Hyderabad.

He has undertaken extensive lecture tours from 1946 to 1972 covering 50 countries. From 1973 to 1986 he visited annually Austraila, U.S.A., Holland and Germany.

In 1986 he was awarded the first Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration.

He has a versatile and facile pen, and has to his credit a number of publications, chief amongst which are: The Message of the Upanisads, A Pilgrim Looks at the World, Vols. I and II; Four Volumes of Eternal Values for a Changing Society-Vol.1: Philosophy and Spirituality, Vol.2: Great Spiritual Teachers, Vol.3: Education for Human Excellence and Vol. 4: Democracy for Total Human Fulfilment: (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan's publications); Human Being in Depth (State University of New York publication) Practical Vedanta and Science of Values (Advaita Ashram publlication), 28 video-tapes expounding the entire Gita sloka by słoka 60 titles of audio tapes expounding the ideas of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Vedanta.

I am grateful to the Kaka Kalelkar Centenary Commit- tee for asking me to come here and give the first Kaka Kalelkar Memorial Lecture. I am a great lover and admirer of human greatness, in whatever field, and in whatever section of people, that greatness appears; and in Kaka Kalelkar we have that stamp of creativity, original- ity, and greatness; he was big in heart and big in head. And so I was very happy when I was asked to come and participate in this function. He was associated with two great personalities, Tagore and Gandhiji. Both of them were of universal dimensions; in fact, they represented that universal dimension of culture which we have devel- oped in this country these five thousand years and have continued to develop it in the modern age as well. With this close association with two of our gigantic personalities, and himself a giant of intellect and of heart, he had lived a rich life, contributing richly to our national life as well.