Born in Ernakulam
Balakrishna Menon is born to a family of judges and journalists. Reading, the family vice.
A movement beyond the classroom — pairing education, culture and spirit across Trivandrum and Kollam for seventy-five years.
In 1968 a saffron-robed monk — born Balakrishna Menon, an Oxford-trained journalist turned Vedantin — opened a single school on a quiet street in Vazhuthacaud, Trivandrum. He called it a vidyalaya. It would become the first of many.
Gurudev Swami Chinmayananda believed that education without character was machinery without a soul; that culture without contemplation was costume without conviction. He set out to build institutions where children learned algebra and the Upanishads in the same week, and where a temple, a school and a study-hall could share a single compound wall.
“ The tragedy of human history is the decreasing happiness in the midst of increasing comforts. ” — Gurudev, 1972
Seventy-five years on, the Trust he founded runs schools, online study circles and temple-centred communities across Trivandrum and Kollam. This is its story.
Balakrishna Menon is born to a family of judges and journalists. Reading, the family vice.
Arrested during the Quit India movement. In prison he reads the Vivekachudamani. Something turns.
Initiation by Swami Sivananda at Rishikesh. The pen is set down. The dialogue begins.
Pune. Three weeks of Upanishad talks. Twelve people come. By the second week, four hundred.
The first Chinmaya Vidyalaya opens in Trivandrum. Eight teachers, sixty-four children, a single classroom.
Gurudev attains mahasamadhi. The Trust now runs eleven schools and two temples. The work continues.
The Trust's first live-streamed satsang reaches seekers in fourteen countries on a single Tuesday evening.
Three pillars. One vision. The lamp is still burning. You are reading this on the year of the Jubilee.
The Trust is not a school. Nor is it a temple. Nor a digital classroom. It is all three, held together by a single conviction: that vidya, samskaara and seva belong in the same sentence.
Online spiritual learning · wisdom on a wire.
Live and recorded classes on the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, Sanskrit, and the practice of sadhana. Open to seekers anywhere — a child in Kollam, an aunt in Boston, a grandfather in Bangalore — gathered in the same study circle.
Schools for holistic development · pre-KG to class XI.
Four campuses across Trivandrum and Kollam. CBSE academics paired with daily shloka chanting, classical music, theatre, sport and what we still simply call good manners. Children leave here knowing trigonometry and the third chapter of the Gita — and unable to tell you which mattered more.
Spiritual centres for community · seva, satsang, song.
Two temple-centres anchor the Trust's cultural life: daily worship, a thousand-voice bhajan evening, the annual Chinmaya Geeta Jnana Yajna, free meals for pilgrims, and the village outreach programmes our volunteers quietly run on weekends without ever putting up a banner.
On Vijayadashami morning the youngest children sit cross-legged before a plate of rice. A teacher guides each small index finger to trace the letter अ. The first word in a life of reading. Some of them will be back in fifty years to do the same for their grandchildren.
A banana leaf, twenty-six dishes, and the whole school sitting cross-legged on the assembly hall floor. The children draw a pookalam in the courtyard at dawn; by lunchtime the petals have already begun to wilt. By tea-time, no one minds. The point was the morning.
At midnight in the prayer hall, a small clay pot of butter hangs from the ceiling. By dawn, the youngest Pre-KG has crushed a peacock feather to one cheek, painted himself blue, and is ready to steal. A pyramid of cousins. A great deal of laughter. A small lesson about play and the divine.
Sixteen Friday evenings on the infinite Self. Sri Swami Advayananda speaks live from Mumbai; we open the Vazhuthacaud prayer hall to the whole neighbourhood and stream it to seekers in fourteen countries. Coffee and biscuits afterwards. The doubts continue on the verandah till about half past ten.
At five in the morning the cauldrons are lit. By eleven the queue has gone around the temple. Twelve hundred plates — pilgrims, auto-drivers, schoolchildren and the occasional MLA — eat sambar and rice and a small banana on the side. Volunteers cook in pairs, mostly silent. There is something to be said for the way a kitchen sounds when nobody is in a hurry.
Nine evenings on a single chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. The hall fills slowly — first the regulars, then the curious, then the children sent to fetch their grandparents who decided to stay. By the eighth evening you have read four hundred verses with two hundred strangers, and they are no longer quite strangers.
Caps go up. Most of them come back down. The principal makes the same speech he made in 1996 and in 2014 and last year. The children pretend they have not heard it before, and find — usually somewhere around the third paragraph — that they actually haven't.
The lamp is lit at the start line at six in the morning. The first hundred-metre dash happens before the dew has fully gone. By afternoon there is a tug-of-war in which a Class V team beats a Class VIII team and nobody quite knows how. The principal, who has been refereeing for thirty years, declares it a moral victory for the entire school.
I learned my times-tables here in 1974 and my granddaughter starts Class I this June. The wall behind the prayer hall is the same. So, in a way, is the prayer.
Sixteen evenings on the infinite Self. Sri Swami Advayananda speaks live from Mumbai; we open the prayer hall to all.
A weekend of music, theatre and children's shloka recital marking 75 years of the movement.
Applications close 28 February. Sibling priority, financial aid available.
Hot meals for 1,200 pilgrims and neighbours. Volunteers welcome from 5 am.
Step through whichever feels right today. They all open onto the same garden.
Pre-KG to class XI. Four campuses. Admissions open January.
→Gita study, Sanskrit primer, Anantham Swaroopam. Live or on-demand.
→Two centres in Trivandrum & Kollam. Daily archana. All welcome.
→Vellayambalam, Vazhuthacaud
Thiruvananthapuram 695014
+91 471 232 3456
Asramam, Kollam 691002
+91 474 274 5678