 My grandmother, my link to the past since my first Brahma Samaj prayer meeting on her lap, encouraged me to rediscover Ram Mohan, India's first modern Sivant. He was also a successful trader, a man of letters, philosopher, politician and a social reformer who founded the Brahma Samaj. Ram Mohan, of course, was born in an age when the Samindas of Bengal had accepted the company's rule. Tradition, however, gave him a Sanskrit education, backed up with Arabic and Persian the code language. By his teens, he was fluent in all three Asian languages, along with his mother tongue, Bengali. He was born in an age when the Samindas of Bengal had accepted the company's rule. Ram Mohan, of course, was born in an age when the Samindas of Bengal had accepted the company's rule. Much of the world justifiably remembers him by his spirited fight against the first emolation of Hindu widows in their husband's funeral pyre. A deeply entrenched ritual, Sati was condoned by faith and guarded by vested interests. The movement for its abolition began with Ram Mohan's personal experience, the emolation of his brother Jagumohan's widow in 1811. Even as a child, I knew from my grandma that it was Ram Mohan who wrote the original trust deed on the basis of which the Brahma Samaj came into being. It came as the culmination of a lifetime's endeavor by one who was as much a man of action as a man of thought and letters. Ram Mohan's lifelong admiration for historic landmarks like the American War of Independence and the French Revolution came with his Rangpur experience, along with new linguistic skills opening windows to European enlightenment and the values of liberty and equality. Ram Mohan left for England on 19th November 1830 to reach its shores on 18th April 1831. His long voyage was distinguished by his encounter with the French tricolor flying on a vessel in the high seas. His excitement and insistence that he be carried on board the French ship despite his indisposition shows his enthusiasm for the values he associated with the Revolution. I think what he did was in Britain anyway, as well as partly in Calcutta, was he astounded the British people. He lectured, he spoke, he went into the houses of parliament, he gave evidence to the Privy Council, all of whom listened to him with not exaggerating or an admiration. So in a sense Ram Mohan is one of the earliest people who is teaching us the virtues of non-violent protest, not just waving one sword and dying fighting, but of living to fight another day and to protest yet another day.