Dr. Vinod Swaran also known as Swami Girijanand ji, is a spiritual teacher with a difference. He does not wear the traditional attire in saffron mostly worn by monks in India. It is a symbol of sacrifice, sanctity and detachment from material things, but this unassuming spiritual leader has huge followings within India and abroad. He is also lovingly called guruji by his followers.
Girijanand ji could easily be mistaken as a professional corporate executive or an academic in a gathering, but he represents India’s ancient tradition of having a life committed to live in its fullness and grandeur. During his brief sojourn in New Delhi during the first week of December, his impact was visible. He drew attention as well as curiosity among Delhi’s high-profile audience, when his sudden presence redefining the traditional perception of a religious leader.
At one of such gatherings on Saturday, December 7, 2024, in New Delhi, Girijanand ji, offered a convergence model of an ideal family life committed to resolve the challenges of the day-today existences being faced by each of us. Unlike other spiritual leaders or gurus, he does not advocate a detached life for attaining spiritual gains, but he unleashes a process of bringing all the elements contributing to the individual and as well as social development. His concept of development is based on an all-inclusive approach against any effort to fragment ourselves in the name of religious persuasions. His concept of a meaningful accomplished life is based on a spiritualism, irrespective of faiths, indeed, a formidable driving force.
Girijanand ji, an accomplished academics, is having a doctorate in spiritualism from Paris. He is convinced that all the faiths, Christianity, Islam or traditional way of life being practiced in India popularly called Hinduism, unleash the energy of the soul for achieving material successes accompanied by the mission for the welfare of each human being. According to him, each individual is blessed with this celestial energy, which has to be tapped individually for our emancipation from the negative energies often crowd us.
Born to a tribal mother and having been nurtured in a socially backward family, Girijanand ji, symbolizes the all-inclusive social order emerging in contemporary India. He has setup an organization, Spiritual Souls, which offers relief to the people facing issues related to mental health, addiction, and the social and communal conflicts in the country. He is expanding his reach to help people to reinvent themselves, especially his own countrymen. According to him, India is poised to attain her legitimate role in the geo-politics in the coming years, but he also cautions us to be wary of distractions by the negative forces, especially communal and other divisive elements. India may be inching towards a powerful global economy, but with this the threats to her plural society is also becoming much more pronounced undermining her march towards a symbol of peace, prosperity and the evolution of a plural society without any discriminations.
Emboldened by the support of nearly 3.2 million followers in India and abroad, Girijanand ji, was quite assertive for the evolution of a plural society. During his informal talks with media in New Delhi, he bemoaned that some irresponsible elements are fanning communal agenda for their narrow political gains in Sambhal (UP) and Ajmer (Rajasthan) and it could be a part of some international agenda to destabilize India.
Without naming China and a section of the West, he has cautioned that there are a few international elements having proxies in India and her neighborhood, undermining the path of each individual’s quest for the self fulfilment. He, however, does not suggest any confrontation with such notorious forces, but asks that each individual to fortify his soul against such aggressions and may seek the cherished solution by looking towards our own soul.
Girijanand ji’s route to peace and prosperity is intertwined with an academic agenda for learning about our own soul and the energy stored in each individual. He further stated that it is necessary for achieving prosperity and empowerment of individuals and their respective social groups by understanding their social and spiritual challenges. According to him, in the contemporary world, the creativity of each individual is necessary for maintaining competitiveness, but not for asserting individual or collective power respectively; these efforts are for complementing each other for better living conditions for the common people. He, however, further explains that new innovations could be possible only in a plural society. There will be a bleak future for a society or country, if it allows a section of its people to indulge in invoking cooked up communal, caste, or ethnic issues for their narrow political and financial gains.
Gopal Misra has been associated with national and international media. His books on journalism and geo-politics have been well-appreciated. Views are personal.
