autobiography of kolkata in english

Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa was the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic congregation of women dedicated to helping the poor. Considered one of the 20th Century's greatest humanitarians, she was canonized as Saint Teresa of Calcutta in 2016.

(1910-1997)

Who Was Mother Teresa?

Nun and missionary Mother Teresa, known in the Catholic church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta, devoted her life to caring for the sick and poor. Born in Macedonia to parents of Albanian-descent and having taught in India for 17 years, Mother Teresa experienced her "call within a call" in 1946. Her order established a hospice; centers for the blind, aged and disabled; and a leper colony.

Mother Teresa’s Family and Young Life

Mother Teresa was born on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, the current capital of the Republic of Macedonia. The following day, she was baptized as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu.

Mother Teresa’s parents, Nikola and Dranafile Bojaxhiu, were of Albanian descent; her father was an entrepreneur who worked as a construction contractor and a trader of medicines and other goods. The Bojaxhius were a devoutly Catholic family, and Nikola was deeply involved in the local church as well as in city politics as a vocal proponent of Albanian independence.

In 1919, when Mother Teresa — then Agnes — was only eight years old, her father suddenly fell ill and died. While the cause of his death remains unknown, many have speculated that political enemies poisoned him.

In the aftermath of her father's death, Agnes became extraordinarily close to her mother, a pious and compassionate woman who instilled in her daughter a deep commitment to charity. Although by no means wealthy, Drana Bojaxhiu extended an open invitation to the city's destitute to dine with her family. "My child, never eat a single mouthful unless you are sharing it with others," she counseled her daughter. When Agnes asked who the people eating with them were, her mother uniformly responded, "Some of them are our relations, but all of them are our people."

Education and Nunhood

Agnes attended a convent-run primary school and then a state-run secondary school. As a girl, she sang in the local Sacred Heart choir and was often asked to sing solos. The congregation made an annual pilgrimage to the Church of the Black Madonna in Letnice, and it was on one such trip at the age of 12 that she first felt a calling to religious life. Six years later, in 1928, an 18-year-old Agnes Bojaxhiu decided to become a nun and set off for Ireland to join the Sisters of Loreto in Dublin. It was there that she took the name Sister Mary Teresa after Saint Thérèse of Lisieux.

A year later, Sister Mary Teresa traveled on to Darjeeling, India, for the novitiate period; in May 1931, she made her First Profession of Vows. Afterward, she was sent to Calcutta, where she was assigned to teach at Saint Mary's High School for Girls, a school run by the Loreto Sisters and dedicated to teaching girls from the city's poorest Bengali families. Sister Teresa learned to speak both Bengali and Hindi fluently as she taught geography and history and dedicated herself to alleviating the girls' poverty through education.

On May 24, 1937, she took her Final Profession of Vows to a life of poverty, chastity and obedience. As was the custom for Loreto nuns, she took on the title of "Mother" upon making her final vows and thus became known as Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa continued to teach at Saint Mary's, and in 1944 she became the school's principal. Through her kindness, generosity and unfailing commitment to her students' education, she sought to lead them to a life of devotion to Christ. "Give me the strength to be ever the light of their lives, so that I may lead them at last to you," she wrote in prayer.

'Call Within a Call'

On September 10, 1946, Mother Teresa experienced a second calling, the "call within a call" that would forever transform her life. She was riding in a train from Calcutta to the Himalayan foothills for a retreat when she said Christ spoke to her and told her to abandon teaching to work in the slums of Calcutta aiding the city's poorest and sickest people.

Since Mother Teresa had taken a vow of obedience, she could not leave her convent without official permission. After nearly a year and a half of lobbying, in January 1948 she finally received approval to pursue this new calling. That August, donning the blue-and-white sari that she would wear in public for the rest of her life, she left the Loreto convent and wandered out into the city. After six months of basic medical training, she voyaged for the first time into Calcutta's slums with no more specific a goal than to aid "the unwanted, the unloved, the uncared for."

Missionaries of Charity

Mother Teresa quickly translated her calling into concrete actions to help the city's poor. She began an open-air school and established a home for the dying destitute in a dilapidated building she convinced the city government to donate to her cause. In October 1950, she won canonical recognition for a new congregation, the Missionaries of Charity, which she founded with only a handful of members—most of them former teachers or pupils from St. Mary's School.

As the ranks of her congregation swelled and donations poured in from around India and across the globe, the scope of Mother Teresa's charitable activities expanded exponentially. Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, she established a leper colony, an orphanage, a nursing home, a family clinic and a string of mobile health clinics.

In 1971, Mother Teresa traveled to New York City to open her first American-based house of charity, and in the summer of 1982, she secretly went to Beirut, Lebanon, where she crossed between Christian East Beirut and Muslim West Beirut to aid children of both faiths. In 1985, Mother Teresa returned to New York and spoke at the 40th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly. While there, she also opened Gift of Love, a home to care for those infected with HIV/AIDS.

Mother Teresa’s Awards and Recognition

In February 1965, Pope Paul VI bestowed the Decree of Praise upon the Missionaries of Charity, which prompted Mother Teresa to begin expanding internationally. By the time of her death in 1997, the Missionaries of Charity numbered more than 4,000 — in addition to thousands more lay volunteers — with 610 foundations in 123 countries around the world.

The Decree of Praise was just the beginning, as Mother Teresa received various honors for her tireless and effective charity. She was awarded the Jewel of India, the highest honor bestowed on Indian civilians, as well as the now-defunct Soviet Union's Gold Medal of the Soviet Peace Committee. In 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her work "in bringing help to suffering humanity."

Criticism of Mother Teresa

Despite this widespread praise, Mother Teresa's life and work have not gone without its controversies. In particular, she has drawn criticism for her vocal endorsement of some of the Catholic Church's more controversial doctrines, such as opposition to contraception and abortion. "I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion," Mother Teresa said in her 1979 Nobel lecture.

In 1995, she publicly advocated a "no" vote in the Irish referendum to end the country's constitutional ban on divorce and remarriage. The most scathing criticism of Mother Teresa can be found in Christopher Hitchens' book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice , in which Hitchens argued that Mother Teresa glorified poverty for her own ends and provided a justification for the preservation of institutions and beliefs that sustained widespread poverty.

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When and How Mother Teresa Died

After several years of deteriorating health, including heart, lung and kidney problems, Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997, at the age of 87.

Mother Teresa’s Letters

In 2003, the publication of Mother Teresa’s private correspondence caused a wholesale re-evaluation of her life by revealing the crisis of faith she suffered for most of the last 50 years of her life.

In one despairing letter to a confidant, she wrote, "Where is my Faith—even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness—My God—how painful is this unknown pain—I have no Faith—I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart—& make me suffer untold agony." While such revelations are shocking considering her public image, they have also made Mother Teresa a more relatable and human figure to all those who experience doubt in their beliefs.

Mother Teresa’s Miracles and Canonization

In 2002, the Vatican recognized a miracle involving an Indian woman named Monica Besra, who said she was cured of an abdominal tumor through Mother Teresa's intercession on the one-year anniversary of her death in 1998. She was beatified (declared in heaven) as "Blessed Teresa of Calcutta" on October 19, 2003, by Pope John Paul II .

On December 17, 2015, Pope Francis issued a decree that recognized a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, clearing the way for her to be canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church. The second miracle involved the healing of Marcilio Andrino, a Brazilian man who was diagnosed with a viral brain infection and lapsed into a coma. His wife, family and friends prayed to Mother Teresa, and when the man was brought to the operating room for emergency surgery, he woke up without pain and was cured of his symptoms, according to a statement from the Missionaries of Charity Father.

Mother Teresa was canonized as a saint on September 4, 2016, a day before the 19th anniversary of her death. Pope Francis led the canonization mass, which was held in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City. Tens of thousands of Catholics and pilgrims from around the world attended the canonization to celebrate the woman who had been called “the saint of the gutters” during her lifetime because of her charitable work with the poor.

“After due deliberation and frequent prayer for divine assistance, and having sought the counsel of many of our brother bishops, we declare and define Blessed Teresa of Calcutta to be a saint, and we enroll her among the saints, decreeing that she is to be venerated as such by the whole church,” Pope Francis said in Latin.

The Pope spoke about Mother Teresa’s life of service in the homily. ”Mother Teresa, in all aspects of her life, was a generous dispenser of divine mercy, making herself available for everyone through her welcome and defense of human life, those unborn and those abandoned and discarded," he said. "She bowed down before those who were spent, left to die on the side of the road, seeing in them their God-given dignity. She made her voice heard before the powers of this world, so that they might recognize their guilt for the crime of poverty they created."

He also told the faithful to follow her example and practice compassion. “Mercy was the salt which gave flavor to her work, it was the light which shone in the darkness of the many who no longer had tears to shed for their poverty and suffering,” he said, adding. "May she be your model of holiness."

Since her death, Mother Teresa has remained in the public spotlight. For her unwavering commitment to aiding those most in need, Mother Teresa stands out as one of the greatest humanitarians of the 20th century. She combined profound empathy and a fervent commitment to her cause with incredible organizational and managerial skills that allowed her to develop a vast and effective international organization of missionaries to help impoverished citizens all across the globe.

Despite the enormous scale of her charitable activities and the millions of lives she touched, to her dying day, she held only the most humble conception of her own achievements. Summing up her life in characteristically self-effacing fashion, Mother Teresa said, "By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus."

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QUICK FACTS

• Name: Teresa
• Birth Year: 1910
• Birth date: August 26, 1910
• Birth City: Skopje
• Birth Country: Macedonia
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: Mother Teresa was the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity, a Roman Catholic congregation of women dedicated to helping the poor. Considered one of the 20th Century's greatest humanitarians, she was canonized as Saint Teresa of Calcutta in 2016.
• Christianity
• Astrological Sign: Virgo
• Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary
• Nacionalities
• Macedonian (Macedonia)
• Albanian (Albania)
• Interesting Facts
• On religious pilgrimage at the age of 12, Mother Teresa experienced her calling to devote her life to Christ.
• Through her own letters, Mother Teresa expressed doubt and wrestled with her faith.
• Mother Teresa was canonized after the Vatican verified two people's claims of having experienced miracles through her.
• Death Year: 1997
• Death date: September 5, 1997
• Death City: Calcutta
• Death Country: India

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Mother Teresa Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/religious-figures/mother-teresa
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: February 24, 2020
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
• God doesn't require us to succeed; he only requires that you try.
• Keep the joy of loving God in your heart and share this joy with all you meet, especially your family.
• Before you speak, it is necessary for you to listen, for God speaks in the silence of the heart.
• Little things are indeed little, but to be faithful in little things is a great thing.
• If we really want to love, we must learn how to forgive.
• Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His love than in your own weakness.
• Speak tenderly to them. Let there be kindness in your face, in your eyes, in your smile, in the warmth of your greeting. Don't only give your care, but give your heart as well.
• Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other and in the home begins the disruption of peace in the world.
• There is a terrible hunger for love. We all experience that in our lives-the pain the loneliness. We must have the courage to recognize it. The poor you may have right in your own family. Find them. Love them.
• Like Jesus, we belong to the world not living for ourselves but for others. The joy of the Lord is our strength.

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An Autobiography Translated From The Malyalam

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Book Source: Digital Library of India Item 2015.552608

dc.contributor.author: Panikkar K.m dc.date.accessioned: 2015-10-14T22:13:48Z dc.date.available: 2015-10-14T22:13:48Z dc.date.digitalpublicationdate: 2010/12 dc.identifier.barcode: 04990010022884 dc.identifier.origpath: /data8/upload/0220/166 dc.identifier.copyno: 1 dc.identifier.uri: http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/handle/2015/552608 dc.description.scannerno: Banasthali University dc.description.scanningcentre: C-DAK, Kolkata dc.description.main: 1 dc.description.tagged: 0 dc.description.totalpages: 385 dc.format.mimetype: application/pdf dc.language.iso: Sanskrit dc.publisher.digitalrepublisher: Digital Library of India dc.publisher: Madras, Sullivan Garden Mylapore Madras dc.rights: Copyright permitted dc.source.library: Central Library, University Of Rajasthan dc.subject.classification: History dc.title: An Autobiography Translated From The Malyalam dc.type: Print - Pape

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Autobiography of a Banyan Tree [PDF Available]

The banyan tree is the king of the forest, today in this autobiography presentation we are covering a topic that is An Autobiography of a Banayan tree, I hope you like the autobiography, so let’s jump in!

Some call me the king of the forest, others call me Buddha’s tree. But generally, I am known as the banyan tree. Over the years, humans have come to symbolize me with life teachings of their own.

While some say I represent the Hindu deity Brahma the creator as I symbolize longevity, other people say that I symbolize the God of the dead, Yama, as I do not let any other being grow on my grounds and my roots and branches are all-consuming.

I live by the outskirts of a town. It has been a very long time since I was born and to be honest I do not know when my date of birth is. But, I do remember growing up in the crevice of a fig tree.

Why, the old accommodating sweet tree was more than happy to provide me with the nutrients a growing body needs as he sourced water and food for me and looked after me, saving my vulnerable shoot from the likes of birds, insects, animals, humans, and drastic weather conditions.

Slowly, I started gaining my strength and aiding the fig tree in return. My roots had found their hold on the fertile ground while my branches rose out like an elliptical canopy of a young tree.

I am stationary and unlike the other trees, I do not fly about when the wind blows or let my leaves soar in the evening breeze. While I may not be able to speak to anyone directly or let them know of my thoughts, I am glad that I can be there for them.

Over the years, I have gradually learned various different languages from listening to humans going past. Some even take a while and sit by my shade to rest and talk to themselves to while their time away or to clear their heads. Whilst they might not know, I always stay to hear them out attentively.

And I know I cannot console them or guide them directly, but I try to make them feel safer and try to give them a safe place to talk about their wrongdoings and worries in and about their lives. When they cry, I try to shield them from the eyes of others.

When they laugh I shake my branches and let leaves rain on them to help celebrate their joy. And although you may never get to hear my words directly, come near me and sit by me. Put your ear close to my core and you can get a glimpse of my feelings.

Growing up, I have always been aided by multiple forces. The sun helped me make my food, the clouds carried water for me, the soil provided nutrients and replenished my thirst on a daily and all of them continue to do so.

While I could never move about, the soft breezes and the strong winds that went about town would gather the news, the stories and the current situation around town and they would glide past me, whispering secrets that they had found.

Often, people think that the quiet one who sits by a corner has no involvement in their society and that they do not know anything. But here I exist to prove the exact opposite. Despite sitting far, far away from the rest of the crowd, away from the rest of the city, I happen to know the most of what happens around town.

People realize that it is in the nature of others to keep talking and spill secrets that were never meant to be told again. But with me, I am all ears, away from the center and they trust me enough to not divulge their fantasies and dreams to anyone else. As I stay growing and branching farther, I root myself deeper into the soil and deeper into the lives of others.

There comes a small child of six who sits and talks about his dreams of becoming a chef. His family does not earn enough to support his dreams and they believe the only way he can support them is by becoming a mechanic.

At this mere age, he cries into my arms as he convinces himself every day that not all dreams come to fruition. And I wish every day that I had arms that could hug him back and tell him to not give up on his dream.

I wish I could tell him to go ahead and support his family but to also always lookout for an opportunity to realize his dreams and to keep working towards it.

Then there’s the young lady who dreams of going to pilot school someday. She hopes to fly among the stars and dive through the clouds. Just recently, she came running and hugged my bark, jumping up and down, excited beyond limits.

She had finally convinced her parents to let her go. The rest of the family may have different viewpoints and her aunt would create a huge commotion according to her but as long as she has the support of her parents, she is ready to brave it all.

And I wish I could tell her someday, that after she leaves, I would be looking up at the sky every day and night, trying to catch a glimpse of a young girl who grew by my side and who I have seen soar to greater heights.

As the days turn into months and months turn into a year, I keep growing farther and farther. At times I wonder that if I keep growing at the rate that I do currently, I will reach the city bounds within no time.

But I must say, I feel like I have aged a bit and life has caught on to me as nowadays my energy diminishes fast and Bram he’s become weak and frail.

A few weeks back I almost befell a tragedy of sorts. According to the work plan of the new town society, they would be creating a highway that crosses past the town outskirts to reduce traffic. Imagine my joy when I heard the news as I realized now I would get to see many people and that I would get to learn so much more.

But to my disappointment and fear, I saw a bulldozer approaching my area followed by a white van. I assumed they must have gotten it to start digging the road. So then imagine my shock when I realize that the bulldozer was instead coming near me to uproot me from my place of birth.

As they claw sunk under my newly formed roots on to the outer edge, I cried out in pain. While none may have heard my voice, I pleaded to the sky and the earth to help me out. How could they disregard my existence and disrespect me so much so as to kill me out in broad daylight and displace from my birthright?

My roots held on steadfast to the ground as the machine approached me again. Due to the loud noise of the bulldozer, some villagers got intrigued and came to see what was happening. Imagine my surprise when I saw within minutes à huge group of people running towards the bulldozer, shouting at the tip of their lungs to make him stop.

The numbers just kept growing as more and more people joined in and started shouting at the officials for trying to uproot me. They claimed that I was a part of the town and the village and that nobody could ever uproot me till the day I die.

I did not know what to do as an overwhelming feeling of happiness and peace washed over me. While I may have never been able to talk to my loved ones, my feelings had got across. I am a banyan tree, and this is my life story.

So how was this autobiography on a banyan tree? Please share your thoughts in the comment section!