Book description
'You don't simply read a man like Vivekananda. In reading him, you meet
him. And if you don't meet him and feel him contemporaneously, you can
understand little of the meaning of what he is saying.' 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 façade, 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.
