In a few days time Swami Vivekananda’s 150th birth anniversary celebrations shall be launched all over the country. Behind the grandeur and colour of every commemorative celebration lies the deeper truth of the significance of the personality or the event.

In the last two centuries, no other individual has captured the hearts of the youth of Bharat, the way Swami Vivekananda did. He blew energy into Bharat which was indulging in self-loathe.

The Upanishadic Ideal of service is based on the concepts of Truth, Dharma and Yajna. Without comprehending these three concepts we cannot understand what we have come to recognise as service today – the most appealing and popular component of modern religions. Let us, therefore, first understand them.

Discovering the Satyam

Sixty years after independence, India is still in the twilight zone of political turmoil, economic imbalance, social turbulence and ideological confusion. Though we claim to be the largest democracy in the world, more often than not our democracy in practice turns out to be acrimonious monocracy. Economically, statistics are trotted out to prove that we made enviable progress. But, in effect, the divide between the rich and the poor has increased enormously. Society is fast disintegrating into organized caste and communal groups reducing nationalism to a meaningless slogan.