Change
By then Narla had changed a lot, both mentally and physically. A chain smoker, he stopped smoking after a heart attack. He organised his library, which had 25,000 books, both English and Telugu. The Library has since been gifted to the Ambdkar Open University in Hyderabad. The deep humanist strain in him developed and he emerged as a rationalist. He studied the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads and other Hindu spiritual works as well as the writings of M.N.Roy. In the process, he developed friendship with the Kashmiri leader, Prem Nath Bazaz, who was banished from Jammu and Kashmir by the administration of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. Bazaz was a friend and follower of M.N. Roy) Sushil Mukerjee (Minerva Associates, Kolkata, Radical Humanist), Niranjan Dhar (author of a controversial book on Vedanta in which he charged Swami Vivekananda the seer with shallowness), Justice V.M. Tarkunde (who resigned as a judge of the Bombay High Court and a renowned human rights activist, Professor A.B. Shah, founder of Indian Secular Society), Avula Gopalakrishna Murthy (advocate and leader of humanist movement in Andhra Pradesh and editor of humanist journals in Telugu).
Read more about this topic: Narla Venkateswara Rao
Famous quotes containing the word change:
“To be faced with what so-and-so’s mother lets him do, or what the teacher said in class today or what all the kids are wearing is to be required to reexamine some part of our belief structure. Each time we rethink our values we reaffirm them or begin to change them. Seen in this way, parenthood affords us an exceptional opportunity for growth.”
—Ruth Davidson Bell (20th century)
“We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own; that we may be well, yet not pure.”
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“And I looked to be happy, and I was,
As I said, for a while but I don’t know!
Somehow the change wore out like a prescription.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)