the Vivekananda Rock Memorial in Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, from May 30 to June 1 to mark the culmination of BJP’s Lok Sabha election campaign. This marks a callback to his two-day visit to Uttarakhand’s Kedarnath shrine at the end of the 2019 election campaign, where he undertook a 15-hour-long ekantvaas (solitary meditation). ABOUT VIVEKANANDA ROCK The Vivekananda Rock is a tiny rocky islet located some 500 metres from Kanyakumari’s Vanathurai beach, the southern tip of mainland India, at the confluence of the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is accessed via a 15-minute ferry service from Vanathurai. In 1892, however, Swami Vivekananda, the revered Hindu philosopher-saint, swam from the shores of Kanyakumari to the rocky islet to meditate. His disciples believe that he meditated there for three days and three nights, and attained enlightenment. Swami Vivekananda had been wandering for four years across the length and breadth of India, and at Kanyakumari, finally formulated his philosophy. THE PHILOSOPHY As he wrote to Swami Ramakrishnananda (not to be confused with his guru, Sri Ramakrishna) in 1894: “At Cape Comorin sitting in Mother Kumari’s temple, sitting on the last bit of Indian rock, I hit upon a plan: We are so many Sannyasins wandering about, and teaching the people metaphysics — it is all madness. Did not our Gurudeva use to say, “An empty stomach is no good for religion?” That those poor people are leading the life of brutes is simply due to ignorance. We have for all ages been sucking their blood and trampling them underfoot” (as quoted in S P Agarwal’s The Social Role of Gita, 1993).