OUR ICONIC HUMANISTS
Gauthama Buddha
(563 BCE-483 BCE)
Buddha is not a name, but a title. It is a Sanskrit word that means “a person who is awake.” What a buddha is awake to is the true nature of reality.Simply put, Buddhism teaches that we all live in a fog of illusions created by mistaken perceptions and “impurities” — hate, greed, ignorance. A buddha is one who is freed from the fog. It is said that when a buddha dies he or she is not reborn but passes into the peace of Nirvana, which is not a “heaven” but a transformed state of existence.Most of the time, when someone says the Buddha, it’s in reference to the historical person who founded Buddhism. This was a man originally named Siddhartha Gautama who lived in what is now northern India and Nepal about twenty-five centuries ago.
Dokka Seethamma
(1841-1909)
Dokka Seethamma also known as Sithamma was born on 1841 and died in the year 1909 was an Indian woman who gained recognition by spending much of her life serving food for poor people and travellers.Seethamma was born in October 1841 in Mandapeta village, Andhra Pradesh. She lost her mother in the young age. Dokka Joganna, a rich farmer, married Seethamma, and this allowed her to offer food to the poor, which she did for more than 40 years, much of it after her husband’s death. At the end of her life, she gave away her possessions and hired a bullock cart driver to take her to Varanasi to die in accordance with her beliefs, but turned back and hastily cooked a meal with begged ingredients after hearing a family in the next room at the pilgrims’ inn talking of being on their way to ask her for food.
Mother Terisa
(26 Aug 1910-05 Sep 1997)
During her lifetime Mother Teresa became famous as the Catholic nun who dedicated her life to caring for the destitute and dying in the slums of Calcutta - now known as Kolkata.She founded the order, The Missionaries of Charity, to look after abandoned babies and to help the poorest of the poor, once saying that they "lived like animals but die like angels".In 1979 she received the Nobel Peace Prize and after her death was canonised as Saint Teresa.Mari Marcel Thekaekara grew up round the corner from Mother Teresa's orphanage, and volunteered there as a young girl.She spoke to Witness about that experience, her own faith, and how she felt about Mother Teresa's methods.
Medha Patkar nee Khanolkal
Medha Patkar worked with voluntary organizations in Mumbai's slums for 5 years and tribal districts of North-East districts of Gujarat for 3 years. She worked as a member of the faculty at Tata Institute of Social Sciences but left her position to take up the fieldwork. She was a Ph.D. scholar at TISS, studying Economics development and its impact on traditional societies. After working up to M.Phil. level she left her unfinished Ph.D. when she became immersed in her work with the tribal and peasant communities in the Narmada valley spread over three states.
