Pandurang Shastri Athavale
Overview
 
Shastri Pandurang Vaijnath Athavale (October 19, 1920 – October 25, 2003), also known as Dada-ji , which literally translates as elder brother in Marathi
Marathi language
Marathi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people of western and central India. It is the official language of the state of Maharashtra. There are over 68 million fluent speakers worldwide. Marathi has the fourth largest number of native speakers in India and is the fifteenth most...

, was an India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n philosopher, spiritual leader, social reformer and Hinduism reformist
Hindu reform movements
Several contemporary groups, collectively termed Hindu reform movements, strive to introduce regeneration and reform to Hinduism. Although these movements are very individual in their exact philosophies they generally stress the spiritual, secular and logical and scientific aspects of the Vedic...

, who founded the Swadhyay Movement
Swadhyay Movement
Swadhyay, a Sanskrit word, means self-study, but it is more than what it connotes. Lord Krishna mentioned Swadhyay as one of the divine attributes one should have it and one of the four Yagna . Also, it is an austerity of speech...

 and the Swadhyay Parivar
Swadhyay Parivar
The Swadhyay Parivar is a group of people in a family setting who study the Vedic scriptures and carry out various activities of self development in a devotional way...

 organization (Swadhyay Family) in 1954, a self-knowledge movement based on the Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita
The ' , also more simply known as Gita, is a 700-verse Hindu scripture that is part of the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, but is frequently treated as a freestanding text, and in particular, as an Upanishad in its own right, one of the several books that constitute general Vedic tradition...

, which has spread across nearly 100,000 villages in India, with over 5 million members.
Quotations

Fearlessness is the result of faith in oneself and faith in God.

God does not work for you. He works with you.

Keep Gita in your head and heart and be proud of yourself.

Progress of mankind is progress of mind and intellect.

Those who see the invisible can do the impossible.

 
x
OK