Extroduction

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This is where it all began, the picture at the center is the home of Swami Vivekananda and this is where he was born, it’s in Calcutta and now it’s turned into a museum. Today, It’s a heritage site right now. So, this is where he was born on 12 January 1863. it was very auspicious today it was the day of makara sankranti. His birth name was Narendranath Dutta and was fondly referred as Naren.

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Naren went to school and remember he was from a very wealthy family. His father was a lawyer in the Calcutta high court, so he got very good education. He went to convent school, westernized education and pretty much when you go to convent, your ideas are shaped by western culture.

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On the right above, what you see is the picture of the Scottish Church College and that’s where he went, and he did his B.A honors degree. The biggest thing that he learnt from the Scottish Church College which shifted his mind was “don’t trust anything until you have evidence”. You should have evidence before you trust anything. Now, this was the basis of complete westernized education and scientific thought which was unlike the Indian thought process which was based on faith and beliefs. So, he was taught, ‘religion is not faith, but religion is realization’ and that became his basis of thought process. That kind of set it up for his life that you should not believe in anything until you see evidence.

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Let me talk a little bit about the Scottish Church College, I don’t know why, it’s not so popular, not talked about, not so socially prominent. But this Scottish Church College in Calcutta, set up in the 1830s, has created some great alumni for this country. If you look at the names, i don’t want to go into that because that’s not focus of my topic here, but anyone interested can go and investigate Google or Wikipedia. Just check out the alumni that this college has produced. You can very well say that, this college has really shaped up the India that we have today. You’re going to find great philosophers, teachers, scientists, doctors, industrialists and many more. There were very rich and famous people as well and right from the 1830s, so that’s the kind of credibility this college has, which very few people know about. This is a college that shaped up India and rightly because, when this all started, Calcutta was the capital of India. A lot of importance was associated with this college then, back in the late years of the nineteenth century.