Shiva jnane jiva seva. Serve living beings, knowing them to be Shiva. The teaching comes from Sri Ramakrishna, and his disciple Swami Vivekananda built a mission on it.
On May 1, 1897, Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Mission at the house of Balaram Basu in north Kolkata. Its motto is Atmano mokshartham jagad hitaya cha: for one’s own liberation and for the welfare of the world.
Dak seva, jan seva. Postal service is public service. A page of the Prime Minister’s website says that India Post “continues to uphold its trusted public-service role in the spirit of ‘Dak Seva, Jan Seva.'” According to a departmental circular of July 2024, as reproduced by a postal study site, the line was added to the logo of the Department of Posts.
In April 1936 Gandhi settled at Segaon, a village near Wardha in Maharashtra. “Gandhiji’s letters used to get misdirected,” to a village of a similar name, Shegaon. “Therefore it was decided in 1940 to rename this village as SEVAGRAM or the village of service,” the Gandhi research site mkgandhi.org records.
The ashram’s own site gives a different account. It dates the change to about a year after Gandhi arrived and says the government made it.
Kayakave Kailasa. Work is Kailasa, the heavenly abode of Shiva. The teaching comes from Basava, the twelfth-century reformer of Karnataka, and is often rendered as “work is worship.”
Gandhi wrote in Young India on November 25, 1926: “No work that is done in His name and dedicated to Him is small.”
On August 15, 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave the Independence Day speech from the Red Fort in Delhi. He told the crowd: Main aapke beech pradhan mantri ke roop mein nahin, pradhan sevak ke roop mein upasthit hoon. In the official translation: “I am present amidst you not as the Prime Minister, but as the Prime Servant.”
On Ayudha Puja, during Navaratri, tools, machines and vehicles are cleaned, polished and worshipped. “Machines like computers and laptops are also kept for Puja,” the Tamil Nadu tourism department writes. “People also wash their vehicles and perform puja for them.” The items stay in place until Vijayadashami.
On November 26, 2008, terrorists attacked the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai. Many of its employees stayed to help the guests. “The chefs formed a human barrier around the guests and took the bullets,” said Rohit Deshpande of Harvard Business School, who studied the attack.
“Staff members had no training in security measures,” he added. Deshpande traced their conduct to the way the Taj recruited its staff, “recruiting for character.”
Kar seva is “the voluntary contribution of physical labor towards cleaning and construction operations at sacred tanks and temples,” in the words of the Sikh Encyclopedia.
In March 2004, the sacred tank of the Golden Temple in Amritsar was cleaned by kar seva. “Devotees from far-flung areas including abroad visited the Golden Temple to participate in the kar seva,” The Tribune reported. According to Gulf News, “Within three days, volunteers cleaned every inch of the tank, carrying mud in anything they could put their hands on.”
The langar of a gurdwara “serves meals to all free of charge, regardless of religion, caste, gender, economic status, or ethnicity,” Wikipedia notes. “People sit on the floor and eat together.” Guru Amar Das required people to “dine together irrespective of their caste and class.”
The kitchen is run by volunteers “doing seva.”
Under its Incredible India campaign, the Ministry of Tourism ran Atithi Devo Bhava, “the guest is god.” The words come from the Taittiriya Upanishad.
The actor Aamir Khan was the face of the campaign until 2016. When his role ended, the ministry said that the advertising agency, not the ministry, had hired him.