'Easy option is not necessarily the best option' - My Homage to Swami Shantidananda ji (Kanta Maharaj)

Everey Ramakrishna monk I come across is capable of giving me gainful company for is he not but a special person whom Sri Ramakrishna calls for his own Sangha? It is bliss to meet and work with sadhus when Sri Ramakrishna is the joyful axis powering our acts.

Kanta Maharaj was just an acquaintance before a young man turned up and wanted to stay in an ashrama whose affairs I was then responsible for. He brought references from some senior sadhus and I had to oblige. Soon I found that it is better if this young man stays somewhere on his own and that our ashrama will neither benefit him nor will be benefited by him. He had been with Kantha Maharaj earlier and so I asked him about this person. His perceptive and loving words showed me the way to go. He agreed it would be difficult to live with and work with this young man, but if a miracle happens and this man stays for some length of time that would benefit him much. So I decided to put up with him and in fact had to put up with quite a lot of problems. He himself left after some months and I was doubly relieved, one that he had gone and again that I had not sent him away but that he left by himself. Most likely Sri Ramakrishna did some great good to him by keeping him in our ashramas for a while.

I salute him due to whom I could appreciate the loving heart of Swami Shantidananda and get a priceless hint about the ways of good works.

From the official Obituary :
http://www.belurmath.org/news_archives/2014/11/04/obituaries-01-november-2014/
Swami Shantidanandaji (Kanta Maharaj) expired on 14 October at about 2.45 am at Seva Pratishthan hospital, Kolkata.  He was 78 and had been suffering from various old-age ailments for some years.  Initiated by Swami Shankaranandaji, he joined the Order in 1955 at Kamarpukur centre and had Sannyasa from Swami Madhavanandaji in 1965.  Besides his joining centre, he served at Saradapitha (Belur) centre as an assistant, and Agartala, Garbeta, Manasadwip and Barasat centres as head.  He had been living a retired life for the last one year mainly at Barasat.  Affectionate and amiable by nature, he endeared himself to all who came in contact with him.

A Mendel among us - Vinayananda the Dahlia Swami

Many brothers of mine have gone away and I was sorry I had not been able to pay my due homage to them, for I was busy bobbing up and down hilly regions of Trivandrum, talking, singing, and organizing classes, and coming back to Nettayam Ashrama for the nights.

Let me try to catch up with their going, though I have this convenient excuse of being busy with more official duties. But no, no excuses. Perhaps I should make this resolution this coming New Year, that I would show due diligence to my writing instincts. So here I begin right away:

Of course, we should consider that 'all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away' but we may also choose to 'consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet ... even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven'.

Swami Vinayananda, our dear Bhuddhadev Maharaj did choose to consider some flowers, especially Dahlias and Roses and he did it very well. He had also managed to play God, so to say, and produced new varieties of Dahlias and discovered some new methods in horticulture. I am 'too lay' a person to get into details about these but even for a layman like me his dedication to horticulture was palpable. Once

sometime in 1988-89 I was assigned to escort him to some places in Kodaikanal, of course, in pursuance of mutual sharing or gaining some knowledge of flowers, chiefly of Roses. I spent some two to three days

with him and was amazed to find that there was so much to talk about flowers. It rained flowers for three days.

For some months, in 2008, while in Aroghya Bhavan, I came across him daily. By now he had withered and his sight had gone dim, but still he talked flowers. Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi came a few times, at the behest of his flower expert wife, to talk flowers with him. So did a few others too.

If memory serves me right, I had heard him say that all his interest and indulging in horticulture began only after he joined Ramakrishna Mission. Swami Lokeswarananda did well to encourage him in his pursuits. He went into it with full gusto and with all patience required of a flower farmer, and discovered newer methods and produced new varieties of Dahlia flowers. The international Dahlia Registry mentions his name and his creations, named after the Holy Mother, Thakur, Swami Vivekananda, Swami Madhavananda, Swami Lokeswarananda and one named Bhikku's Mother. He wrote under the name 'Bhikku Buddhadev' and produced some definitive books. He was sought after as a judge in flower shows.

Now-a-days a Ramakrishna Mission Monk going abroad is not a big deal, but for good or bad, back in the 1980s, we thought differently and forbade him to accept several invitations from prestigious international forums. I think the loss is more to us than to him.

The Ramakrishna Mission has arranged it acts better now after Vivekananda University came into being.

See for official obituary : 

http://www.belurmath.org/news_archives/2015/01/02/obituaries-01-january-2015/

Swami Vinayananda (Buddhadev / Pramod Ranjan) passed away at Arogya Bhavan, Belur Math, on 7 December at about 4.20 am owing to a sudden cardiac arrest. He was 77. Initiated by Swami Madhavanandaji Maharaj, he joined the Order in 1962 at Narendrapur centre and had Sannyasa from Swami Vireshwaranandaji Maharaj in 1974. Besides his joining centre, he served at Mayavati, Deoghar, Mumbai, Malda and Delhi centres as an assistant and Asansol centre as head. Towards the end of 1989 he withdrew himself from active life owing to ill health and had been living a retired life at Belur Math since then. An expert floriculturist, especially in growing roses and dahlias, he was often invited by several floriculture societies to act as a judge in their shows. He also authored a few books and a number of articles on floriculture in several national and international journals. The Swami was quiet and austere by nature.

The Painter of Divinities - My Homage to Swami Umanathananda ji (Shrish Maharaj)

Who are the spectators for this huge film called Life? Who is the Director who so ably directs the actors that they forget themselves and merge so seamlessly into the skin of their characters?

I suppose every character is dear to a dedicated director; every single one of them, not only the Lead, is precious to the director; and, at the end of their part when the actors shed their costume and resume their real selves, the Director and Her peers, perhaps give a standing ovation.

Shrish Maharaj has left the stage; his merry mannerisms with hints of boisterousness and his hearty accents are still ringing in my memory.

It seems that our extravagant Director does not care to keep copies of films. It is a pity that we do not have good copies of such priceless acting but it seems the capricious Boss does not like our lives' sloppy, loopy, spools of reels rolling round and round forever and ever. She lets the scenes play out in the minds of people and allows them to fade away as She sets up fresh characters at a fast and furious pace.

But oh, not yet; let me reflect on this Character a little more while;

He was fifty plus and I was twenty plus when I first met him. I had heard of his reputation as a good artist (painting) and I think I had already seen some of his paintings. Two of the well-known pictures of his are his portraits of the Holy Mother, one in the dining hall of Belur Math and the other at the entrance of Aroghya Bhavan. He must have done more than one hundred paintings. He confined himself to delineating the forms of the Holy Trio only and even in that, he took a conscious decision to portray only the standard photographs of Sri Ramakrishna, Mother and Swami Vivekananda.

In the Ramakrishna Mission, fortunately or unfortunately, in general, a monk is allowed to ride his hobbyhorse only if he does some standard routine work in a satisfactory manner. He was working under Swami Madhavananda and he went on to work under his successor Swami Vireshwarananda, who was perhaps midway in the process of getting into the skin of an unflappable strong boss Character. Once when Shrish Maharaj pointed out some minor mistake in a statement made by Swami Vireshwarananda, it irked the later. Shrish Maharaj told me that he had made the correction in a rater peremptory manner and that tone had annoyed Vireshwarananda. Though Shrish Maharaj must have tried later to be duly deferential in his ways, I think his ‘on your face’ style never fully left him; and why should it, we may ask; when the script-writer and the Director have given him his Character, let him stick to it, we would say and, yes, he basically stuck to it and they seemed to have accepted him as he was and also provided some ample space for his hobbyhorse to amble on; with great reluctance and at a very late age did he dismount his horse; he was attempting at painting even at a very advanced age, when he was limping and dragging his picture stands behind him. He has left quite a few unfinished pictures. I hope they are in proper care and custody. His finished paintings too would be preserved well, I hope.

He would try to get people to do little errands for him, like clearing up a corner of his cluttered room, or move a picture from here to there, etc. I was one of such occasional errand boys. When I was not in a position or mood to do anything for him I used to give a wide berth to his room and even that part of the Aroghya Bhavan where his room was, for he would be lying in lay to catch a potential passer-by.

Once a good doctor prescribed cycle riding for him, a sort of special cycle meant for some particular physiotherapy; for many minutes this old monk drove around fast and furious all over the campus in glee. He joked about the possibility of plunging, zing, into the Ganga and about how lovely it would be; I think I was reminded about the monk about whom Nivedita heard Swamiji talk of, one who was so overwhelmed when he beheld a sublime, picture-perfect scenery at a Himalayan top that he just plunged down into it. Shrish Maharaj must have talked this way to a few more people and the next day he was divested of his cycle and was back to his picturesque limping style of walk. That walk needs a mention, by the way. He used to walk with two sticks and drag his feet slowly and would have made a good talking companion to any adventurous tortoise willing to listen. He straddled around the Math campus in this regal fashion for quite some years. Then when he entered into Aroghya Bhavan, he mostly conducted his forays confined within his wheel chair, except for that brief flash of cycling therapy.

But he did keep walking, as often as he could, to one place very near Aroghya Bhavan. There is a mango tree before entering the Karmi Bhavan; it has a platform, now in broken condition (well, that was how it was the last time I saw it about a year back). There is a step to climb onto it. One evening as he emerged out from the Aroghya Bhavan he called out to me and when I went near him, he put his arm on me and limped towards the tree using my shoulders as his prop. When he was about to climb atop the platform, I protested a bit, asking why he should trouble himself in this way. He asked me to climb up and see for myself and I saw a sight, which later I have shown to many scores of sightseers. It was a sight to behold. I started calling this place the Door Darshan Point. You needed to be at this point either before sunrise or anytime after sunset but before the temple closes. (Unfortunately, about two years back I found a rude and abrupt boundary wall entirely blocking out the sight; I hope something is done about it)

He showed me the Holiest of Holies. It was my great pleasure while I was residing at Belur Math to show it to many more – monks and some devotees – and get pleased beholding their joy at the sight they beheld.

Hari Om Ramakrishna

Swami Umanathananda ji (Shrish Maharaj) passed away on 2 January 2014 at 3.45 am at Seva Pratishthan.  He was 88.  Cremation was at Belur Math in the afternoon  of 2 January 2014 starting at 12.15 pm.

Old is Gold

As 2013 folded up it folded unto itself four of our monks.  To us they all seem to be from the same generation; though the youngest was 68 and oldest 87, their joining the Order was just within 1956-1967.

Friends, I am learning never to take old folks for granted. You can never tell when and which one of them will suddenly choose to pull wool over your eyes and just simply disappear from view - a total irrevocable disappearance. When Amitabhananda ji did it on Sep.11, it rankled me as it sank in that my ready (though a bit abrasive and very tangential) reference point to everything that matters to us Ramakrishna people, has quietly faded away. Now-a-days even when I think I have to be a bit hard on old people, I try to cushion it somewhat. Those voices have trailed off. Their faces have blurred themselves into a uniform fiery glow. Their antics have tucked themselves into tales told in our gossip. And of course, their passage makes me recall Yudhistra’s answer to Yaksha’s last question (What is the greatest wonder?) and at least in a statutory, cursory way, wonder about the mortality of thisbody without which I am not able to conceive of myself. 

Swami Girijeshananda ji was loved by a good number of people. I have heard much about his able services in Delhi. I have seen him at close quarters a few times. The earliest I could remember was when he came to Madras Vivekananda College sometime in early 1990s to conduct interviews to recruit teachers for Ramakrishna Mission at Narottam Nagar at Arunachal Pradesh. There I could see for myself how meticulous he was in his work.  Some might consider it a great thing if a horse dies in harness, but the Blue Cross is sure to file a case against those cruel people who worked a sick horse to death and they might win it too. The silent and steady workhorses deserve a better and quiet death in peace and harmony at safe and snoozy stables. I am happy anyway that he got some quality years because of a donated kidney from another monk.

By donating his kidney and by accepting it, both monks have set a very healthy convention. There needn’t be any more doubt in any Ramakrishna Mission monk about donating eyes or any vital organ. Monks of Ramakrishna Mission are free to make such donations. I have already pledged my eyes and hope to pledge some organs too. There is nothing official against it. I have been told by authorities that though Mission cannot promise to fulfill the wish of the donor they would do their best to do so.

Ram Maharaj (twin of Lakshman Maharaj of Chicago) passed away. We don’t have anybody of their stature now in Vedic chanting. Welcome Brothers, we need to fill in the breach fast. The old generation is in a hurry to go. Computers are ok; facebook is ok; but we need to resort more and more to Shastras, the sure panacea and passage to Immortality.

And our dear Sudhangshu Maharaj, I am sorry I am yet to complete any of your book. I think he was in Belur Math sometime between 1980 to 1982, when he handed a large number of his books and told me to put a few copies of them in each of the crates we were shipping to our foreign centres. His pen name was Ananda and his books all sounded so very learned. They had no chapters, profuse quotations, many of them from western authors, and grudgingly paragraphed passages. Some portions made sense to me and made me want to read the whole of it (which I have not yet done). Even as his Parkinsonism was continuing its relentless march, his friendly and encouraging way of conversation clung with him. Some of his books were kept away from general view out of fear they might be misunderstood but I think those who did this are the ones who misunderstood it. I read some portions of the book whose title is something like ‘Monk with a key’. There is very good chance that this might be first book of Ananda that I would be completing. Let me go to the Library where I saw it and I will surely do it if I get half a chance.

And about Jnan Maharaj, I don’t know him much, but recall a few moments with him, when the smile he sports in the photo, extended itself so gently and gracefully into his talks and demeanor.

Oh this, my silly and self-conscious self! Don’t lose the people around you before due time. Take note of all those precious people around you. Don’t throw back their tantrums; let them lie where they land. Ok, answer their mannerisms with yours, but see to it that malice has no access anywhere.

http://www.belurmath.org/news_archives/2014/01/02/obituaries-1-january-2014/