In 1892, Swami Vivekananda swam to the rock off the southern tip of mainland India, and pondered for 3 days and nights.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi introduced on Tuesday (May 28) that he will go to and meditate at the Vivekananda Rock Memorial in Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, from May 30 to June 1 to mark the culmination of BJP’s Lok Sabha election campaign.
This marks a callback to his two-day visit to Uttarakhand’s Kedarnath shrine at the cease of the 2019 election campaign, in which he undertook a 15-hour-lengthy ekantvaas (solitary meditation).
Here is what may be behind the high minister’s selection to meditate in Kanyakumari.
The rock wherein Swami Vivekananda attained enlightenment
The Vivekananda Rock is a tiny rocky islet positioned some 500 metres from Kanyakumari’s Vavathurai beach, the southern tip of mainland India, on the confluence of the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is accessed through a fifteen-minute ferry provider from Vavathurai.
In 1892, but, Swami Vivekananda, the respected Hindu logician-saint, swam from the beaches of Kanyakumari to the rocky islet to meditate. His disciples agree with that he pondered there for 3 days and 3 nights, and attained enlightenment. Swami Vivekananda had been wandering for four years throughout the period and breadth of India, and at Kanyakumari, sooner or later formulated his philosophy
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As he wrote to Swami Ramkrishnananda (no longer to be burdened along with his guru, Sri Ramakrishna) in 1894: “At Cape Comorin sitting in Mother Kumari’s temple, sitting at the final bit of Indian rock, I come across a plan: We are so many Sannyasins wandering approximately, and coaching the humans metaphysics — it is all insanity. Did now not our Gurudeva use to mention, “An empty stomach isn’t any correct for religion?” That those terrible humans are leading the existence of brutes is certainly due to lack of expertise. We have for every age been sucking their blood and trampling them underfoot” (as quoted in S P Agarwal’s The Social Role of Gita, 1993).
On the eve of Swami Vivekananda’s delivery centenary in 1963, the Vivekananda Rock Memorial Committee led by way of RSS activist Eknath Ranade made efforts to commemorate the web page of his enlightenment. The memorial on the rock become formally inaugurated via the President V V Giri in 1970.
Behind the prime minister’s choice
Prime Minister Modi has lengthy respected Swami Vivekananda as a role version. As a younger guy, he was even a member of the Ramakrishna Mission, a religious and philanthropic employer founded with the aid of Swami Vivekananda.
Speaking at the Mission’s a hundred and twenty fifth anniversary celebrations last year, he had stated, “Swami Vivekananda had a grand vision of India, and I am positive he’s proudly watching India working to fulfil this vision”
The choice of the Vivekananda Rock as the website for Prime Minister Modi’s meditative retreat additionally assumes importance in mild of his suggested push into the South for the duration of this 12 months’s Lok Sabha campaign. Over a third of the high minister’s trips to the South came about within the ultimate three years, with seven visits made to Tamil Nadu in 2024 by myself.
The five southern states — Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka — account for 131 of 543 Lok Sabha seats. Tamil Nadu on my own debts for 39 seats in the Parliament. Prime Minister Modi has forecasted the emergence of the BJP because the single-largest birthday party in the South. In an interview to PTI on May 20, he stated: “We have already seen a jump in mind-share already, we can see a big bounce in seat share and vote proportion for us in the vicinity.”