Ramakrishna Mission announces 2-year fellowship

The Ramakrishna Mission on Saturday announced a two-year Vivekananda Fellowship with a stipend of minimum `20,000 per month for graduates at a youth convention held on its premises in the national capital. The youth convention, “Awaken to Your Life’s Purpose”, was attended by around 800 students from different educational institutions.

The fellowship is being instituted to spread the Ramakrishna Mission’s value education programme, titled “Awakened Citizen Programme”, to new areas. The Vivekananda fellows will serve as resource persons for the Awakened Citizen Programme. Currently, the programme is being run in mo-re than 800 schools across the country. Since the programme is extremely popular with students and has been well-received by teachers and parents, it is slowly spreading to more areas.

The youth convention provided the audience with a platform to interact with personalities who have excelled in their chosen fields and have also contributed in a big way to society. Among these were Anand Kumar of IIT Super30 classes; IIT and IIM alumnus Vinayak Lohani who set up Parivar, an orphanage for 1,200 children; and Wharton alumnus and hip-hop artiste Nimo (Nimesh Patel), who set up a dance troupe of underprivileged children and took them on a world tour. Mr Kumar talked about what he thought true success was and Mr Lohani about his inner calling. Swami Shantatmananda welcomed the participants and Swapan Dasgupta gave the keynote address.

The convention came at the end of a series of programmes held in the past few months to inspire youth on the ideas and ideals of Swami Vivekananda and motivate them to participate in national integration and the regeneration of the country.