By Arun Lakshman

Chennai, Mar 20 (IANS): Ramgopalratnam is now a pracharak of Bhagwad Gita and is on a mission to take Gita across the villages and slums of South India. M.Tech in Mechanical Engineering, social life has always been the passion and mission for this Tamil Nadu native-born and brought up in Nagpur.

He passed Btech and Mtech from the National Institute of Technology (then Regional Engineering College), Nagpur and after working for a short time as an engineer he switched to social life becoming a full-time 'Pracharak' of the RSS.

He worked along with the present Sarsangachalak of the RSS, Mohan Bhagwat in Nagpur, has worked in various capacities in the Sangh and has been a pracharak of the organisation in South Africa as well. He was an RSS pracharak for 17 years commencing from 1983 and ending in 2000. The last two years of his RSS pracharakship were in South Africa.

After the RSS full-timer ship, Ramgoplaratnam said that he was in zero balance and had to do something for a living. He took LIC agency and in seven days he could not stand with the total money motive concept and surrendered it. He being an MTech engineer commenced Mathematics tuition classes for 10th-standard students but the pressure from the parents to give maximum homework to students was not according to his system of teaching and called it off.

He later went to a friend's place in Western Maharashtra and the friend who was a top official with a corporate was in a point of depression and he asked Ramgopalratnam whether he (Ramgopalratnam) could give a motivation class to him and his team. He readily agreed and talked for an hour with whatever knowledge he had and later he understood that his calling was Bhagwad Gita. He dedicated a year to learn all the 700 slokas by heart and started spreading the message of Gita from 2002. He is now a Gita pracharak without any passion for money and all his basic needs are being met by the people who give him small donations.

While speaking to IANS he said, "Gita is a modern-day teaching and everything that one finds in the universe is in Gita and hence I thought of taking this holy text to all the people in South India to start with and later on spread it nationally and then to other countries. Gita is the solution to the problems faced by the world and I am on that mission now."

This Bhagwad Gita pracharak is unique in that he travels into villages and conducts 'Satsang' for three or four days in a small hamlet and tries to inculcate the spirit of Gita into the hearts of villagers.

He said that there was a very positive response from colonies where Dalit communities lives. Ramgopalratnam said, "Once when I reached a colony by evening I announced that a Gita class would be conducted for three days from next day onwards. Early in the morning, I got an invite from a home and the woman of that house told me that the colony has decided not to cook non-vegetarian food during my discourse. This was a major eye-opener to me. People will come forward positively if they understand that you are committed fully to what you preach."

The Gita pracharak said that he never had any bad response from anywhere where he conducted the discourse except the low presence in some areas. When asked whether he had to face any physical attack from people of other faiths, he said, "Never had I experienced any such thing across Tamil Nadu. People behaved to me in respect and I was given a seat wherever I went preaching the Bhagwad Gita."

Ramgopalratnam also said that he had experienced some unique celestial bliss during his discourses and said that wherever he conducted the Gita discourse, there would be a light drizzle in either of the three days.

He said, "I had this experience of a drizzle one day during my course of discourse and I feel that it is heavenly bliss. Even while I conducted a Gita class in RasalKhaimah, UAE, there was a drizzle and people there told me that rains were a no-no during that time of the year in the UAE."

The engineer turned social worker and Gita pracharak is planning a major international Gita conference and seminar in Chennai by the second week of December which would be a spiritual confluence in the capital of Tamil Nadu.