MUMBAI: The Mata Amritanandamayi Math will be donating Rs 5 lakh each to the families of more than 40 CRPF troopers who were martyred in the dastardly terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district last week.
Deeply saddened at the nation losing so many of its brave hearts, Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma) said, “It is our dharma to support the families of these brave men who died while doing their dharma of protecting the nation. My heart goes out to their families and loved ones. May we all pray for their peace and wellbeing.”
The Mata Amritanandamayi Math announced the donation as Amma was travelling to Mysore, the first stop on the northern leg of her 2019 Bharata Yatra.
Amma has delivered addresses at the United Nations several times and has spoken twice at the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Among other accolades, she has received the Gandhi-King Award for Non-violence in Geneva, the James Parks Morton Interfaith Award in New York, and an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York. In 2014, at the invitation of His Holiness Pope Francis, Amma was one of 12 religious and spiritual leaders to travel to the Vatican to sign a joint declaration against modern slavery. Throughout her life, Amma has embraced and comforted more than 3.8 crore people. When asked where she gets the energy to help so many people while also building and running a massive humanitarian organization, Amma answers, “Where there is true love, everything is effortless. Love transforms.”
Amma’s organisation exists to help alleviate the burden of the poor through helping to meet each of their five basic needs—food, shelter, healthcare, education, and livelihood—wherever and whenever possible. MAM is especially focused on helping to meet these needs in the aftermath of major disasters. To date, MAM has provided free medical care to more than four million people. It has built more than 47,000 homes for the homeless throughout India and has provided financial aid for more than one lakh people unable to care for themselves.
MAM is also providing educational assistance to 50,000 students. Moreover it is offering vocational-training, literacy-training, running orphanages, hospices, old-age homes, scholarship programs, planting trees and managing environmental-protection programs. MAM has done massive relief-and-rehabilitation work following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as well as in response to flooding in Mumbai, Gujarat, Chennai and Bihar, Uttarakhand and Jammu-Kashmir, as well as in response to earthquakes in Kashmir, Nepal, Haiti and Japan, cyclones in West Bengal and the Philippines, and hurricanes in the United States.
