Page 96 - Demo

In the late 1940s when PVG Raju began taking an active interest in public affairs, there were four institutions - a high school, a degree college, a Sanskrit college, and a college of music and dance. While the sources of funding for them in earlier times were hazy, it is evident that PVG Raju supported the entire operational expenses through the 1950s from his personal income. On the one hand, his support can be viewed as a continuation of a tradition that was a part of his inheritance. Another way of looking at it would be that he was motivated by his developing view that the best form of philanthropy is investment in education as it is a catalyst for societal transformation and development of his people. He was determined that his role would be not only to continue the work of his forefathers but to take a new direction based on his thinking on the role education would play in nation-building. His own life experience helped to concretise his understanding. PVG Raju had spent time in the USA living as an ordinary man, even working as a waiter in a cafeteria and must have experienced at firsthand how the other half lives. He was already a member of the Socialist Party and interactions with people like Jayaprakash Narayan, Mohan Kumaramangalam, Ram Manohar Lohia and the like would certainly have influenced his thinking on education as a means to democratisation, through a process of empowerment. This extended to his thoughts on the role women and people from deprived sections of society ought to be playing. By this time, PVG Raju had also developed a spiritual bent of mind because of his budding relationship with Swami Jnanananda, the ascetic nuclear physicist %u2013 whom PVG Raju later acknowledged as his guru and mentor on many occasions. The Swamiji, who had spent over a decade in the Himalayas in 86