New president of the Ramakrishna Order
SWAMI Gahananandaji Maharaj was elected President of the Ramakrishna
Math and Ramakrishna Mission at a meeting of the Board of Trustees of
the Math and the Governing Body of the Mission on May 25. He is the 14th
President of the Order.
Swami Gahananandaji was one of the Vice-Presidents of the Math and
Mission since 14 April 1992, and succeeds Swami Ranganathanandaji
Maharaj who passed away on April 25, 2005.
Born in the village of Paharpur in Sylhet district (now in
Bangladesh) in October 1916, he joined the Ramakrishna Order at its
centre in Bhubaneswar in January 1939 at the age of 22.
He received mantra diksha from Swami Virajanandaji Maharaj, the then
President of the Order, in 1939 and Sannyasa from him in 1948. He served
at Advaita Ashrama, Kolkata, from 1942 to 1952 and at Shillong centre
from 1953 to 1958.
Keenly interested in service to sick and suffering people, he was
posted to the Mission's hospital centre, Ramakrishna Mission Seva
Pratishthan, Kolkata, in 1958.
There he worked during the first five years as its Assistant
Secretary and then as its head for 22 years. He worked tirelessly to
develop the services of Seva Pratishthan to cater to the medical needs
of more and more people belonging to poor and low-income sections of the
society and converted the original small maternity hospital into a huge
550-bed, modern, well-equipped hospital that it is today.
He was elected a Trustee of the Ramakrishna Math and Member of the
Governing Body of the Ramakrishna Mission in 1965.
In 1979, he was appointed an Assistant Secretary of the twin
organizations. He became the General Secretary of the Math and Mission
in 1989 and continued in that post for three years till 1992 when he
became a Vice-President of the Order.
From that time he was also simultaneously the head of Ramakrishna
Math (Yogodyan) at Kankurgachhi, Kolkata.
As a Vice-President of the Math and Mission, Swami Gahananandaji
travelled extensively in various parts of the country and visited many
branches of the Order.
He also visited at different times various places in USA, Canada,
England, France, Switzerland, Holland, Russia, Australia, Japan,
Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia and Mauritius. In
all these places, he spread the message of Vedanta and Sri Ramakrishna,
Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi and Swami Vivekananda. |