GREAT INDIAN PERSONALITIES

MAHATMA GANDHI

Mahatma Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869 in Porbandar, Gujrat, India.

His full name was Mohandas Karamchand

Gandhi. He spent his life working for the cause of freeing

India from the clutches of British rule, by using noble means and principles of non-violence and satyagrah.

He is known as Mahatma, meaning 'great soul', because of his work on non-violence, satyagrah and selfless service to his people.

On 15 August 1947, he and his followers forced the British to leave India.

Rightfully, he is called the father of the nation.

MOTHER TERESA Mother Teresa, whose original name was Agnes

Gonxha Bojaxhiu, was born on August 26, 1910 in what is now Skopje, Macedonia .

She always wrote her birthday as the 27th of August because that was the day of her baptism, which was always more important to her than her birth.

For her work with the poor around the world she received the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1950, she founded a religious order in Calcutta called the Missionaries of Charity.

The order provides food for the needy and operates hospitals, schools, orphanages, youth centers, and shelters for lepers and the dying poor.

Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997.

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA A spiritual genius of commanding intellect and

power, Vivekananda crammed immense labor and achievement into his short life, 1863-1902.

Born in the Datta family of Calcutta, the youthful Vivekananda embraced the agnostic philosophies of the Western mind along with the worship of science.

He found his master in Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.

Accepting an opportunity to represent Hinduism at Chicago's Parliament of Religions in 1893, Vivekananda won instant celebrity in America and a ready forum for his spiritual teaching.

For three years he spread the Vedanta philosophy and religion in America and England and then returned to India to found the Ramakrishna Math and Mission.

He died July 4, 1902, after a second, much shorter sojourn in the West.

ARYABHATTA Aryabhatta was born in Patliputra in Magadha, modern

Patna in Bihar.

He was born in 476 AD in Kerala. He studied at the University of Nalanda.

Aryabhatta is a renowned mathematician and astronomer of ancient India.

One of his major work was Aryabhatiya written in 499

AD. The book dealt with many topics like astronomy, spherical trigonometry, arithmetic, algebra and plane trigonometry.

In the field of astronomy, Aryabhatta was the pioneer to infer that the Earth is spherical and it rotates on its own axis which results in day and night.

His propounded methods of astronomical calculations in his Aryabhatta-Siddhatha which was used to make the the Panchanga (Hindu calendar).

What Copernicus and Galileo propounded was suggested by Aryabhatta nearly 1500 years ago.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta, India into a

wealthy Brahmin family.

Greatest writer in modern Indian literature, Bengali poet, novelist, educator, and an early advocate of Independence for India.

Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

Tagore's influence over Gandhi and the founders of modern India was enormous, but his reputation in the West as a mystic has perhaps mislead his Western readers to ignore his role as a reformer and critic of colonialism.

"When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose touch of the one in the play of the many." (from Gitanjali)

Composed the National Anthem of India.

He was the one who gave the name ‘MAHATHMA’ to Gandhiji.