Dr. Ramesh Bijlani
Ramesh Bijlani is a rare combination – a medical doctor, scientist, educationist, a much-loved and admired teacher, writer, inspirational speaker, and a spiritual seeker – all rolled into one.
On one hand, he is a medical man with both the basic degree in medicine (1970) and a doctorate in Physiology (1973) from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, the premier medical institute of India, and a Master’s degree in Nutrition from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge MA, USA. However, his educational background, and his position as Professor & Head of the Department of Physiology at AIIMS, New Delhi, which he quit voluntarily in 2005, tell very little about him. He is a born teacher and has behind him 25 years of research on nutrition in relation to chronic disease. A turning point in his life was his first visit to Sri Aurobindo Ashram – Delhi Branch in 1992. His personal and professional life converged when he established at AIIMS, in the year 2000, the Integral Health Clinic for providing lifestyle modification courses based on yoga, in tune with the latest advances in mind-body medicine.
He is an inspirational speaker and a writer. To his credit are more than 50 scientific publications listed in PubMed; more than 50 popular articles; more than 300 articles on the spiritual networking site, ‘Speaking Tree’, managed by ‘The Times of India’ group; and more than 25 books on a wide variety of subjects such as Physiology, Nutrition, Education, Research Methodology, Yoga and Spirituality, besides a large number of children’s books.
The online learning platform YES (Yoga, Education & Spirituality), initiated in November 2021, was his brainchild, inspired by Sri Aurobindo’s 150th Birth Anniversary.
The YES project has now taken the shape of a public charitable Trust. The Trust provides modest funding for the activities of the project but also institute awards, scholarships and fellowships to encourage those young people all over the world, who are trying to carve out a career that would combine making a living with a purpose in life.
How Ramesh Bijlani looks at himself is as a chemist who has the privilege of dispensing small doses of love and wisdom from the inexhaustible pharmacy of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.