-S.Gurumurthy
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Padmavibhushan P. Parameswaran
(1927 – 9 February 2020) |
Parameswaran ji, as he was known to his countless admirers, is no more. P Parameswaran, who became the pracharak of RSS when he was 23 and ceaselessly worked for 70 years more till he breathed his last, had only one mission in life that was nation and one deity that was Bharatmata. Though an organisation man, his acute intellectual urge drove him to found the Bharatiya Vichara Kendram in Thiruvananthapuram decades ago, through which he expounded the other, uncelebrated spiritual mind of Kerala.
For a quarter-century until his demise, he headed and spread the work of Vivekananda Kendra, Kanyakumari, which is doing a yeoman’s service to the distanced and disadvantaged people of Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya and Andaman Islands. Undeterred by the stately power of contextual Kerala intellectualism, he remained a centennial seer who looked beyond his life and times as he spoke and wrote for decades with dignity and respect towards those who disagreed with him, even derided him.
MULTI-DIMENSIONAL PERSONALITY
He was a multidimensional personality. A prodigious reader, he must have read thousands of titles in his mother tongue and English. A prolific writer, he has written over 20 books, in Malayalam and English. As a journalist, he ceaselessly wrote for decades, particularly columns in Yuva Bharati, a journal of Vivekananda Kendra which he edited. He was an elegant orator in both English and Malayalam and he spoke not to win the approval of his audience but to impart what he thought they should know.
He was an extraordinary, original thinker. He was wrongly regarded as a ‘right-wing’ thinker based on the popular division in the Indian discourse which draws its norms and labels from Western dictionary. What needs to be recalled when Parameswaran is not around is not his personal details, but the social thinking he expounded in the most difficult times in Kerala.