The Life and Times of Baba Ramdev | A Biography

The unfolding saga of a contemporary mass leader pursuing a dream and a strategy for integrating yoga and health care into popular consciousness .... The advent of Baba Ramdev as the latest ideologue of a national and global spiritual revival is regarded as a fascinating phenomenon by many. This thesis is a study on making the Ramdev spectacle with all its inevitable assertiveness, mass excitement and controversy, of course. This attempts to locate its philosophy in today's socio-cultural setting while tracing its roots in Indian spiritual history and past landmark reformist movements initiated in the country by earlier path breakers like Sri Aurobindo, Swami Dayananda, Paramhansa Yogananda, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, Bhagwan Nityananda, J. N. Krishnamurty, and Sri Ramana Rishi, among others. Indeed, Ramdev represents a renewed continuity to the great revival of the ancient Indian spiritual traditions and yoga which occurred in the twentieth century and received worldwide recognition. Baba Ramdev has proposed two distinct ideological alternatives to the current established world pranayama order and the yogic way of life as the key to health restoration and well-being with his own version of holistic yoga as a ploy to institute the universal right to health; and the manifestation of an enabling spiritual environment for personal and social transformation. Ramdev 's emergence once again demonstrates the ongoing importance of the world-wide Oriental spiritualism as it provides perhaps the most exciting ideas for creating a new spiritually-awakened man who is at peace with himself and the world around him.