Yes folks, from Kolkata in the north of the Bay of Bengal to Chennai in the south, education and intellectual pursuits has long been intrinsic to the eastern coastal belt of India. When the venerated monk of the Ramakrishna Order, Swami Vivekananda, returned from the US after his epochal Chicago address in September 1893, he went straight to Madras (now more familiar to us as Chennai). After the stimulating sojourn among the enlightened world spiritual leaders in the US, the monk wanted to revive the philosophical spirit of Hinduism in India, and thought that Madras was the best starting point as it was regarded, together with Calcutta in those days, the hub of the intelligentsia of India. These two cities have produced renowned modern intellectual giants of India; to name but just 2: the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan of Chennai (remember the movie, The Man who Knew Infinity, Pressman Films, 2015?) and Satyendranath Bose, the celebrated Physicist who introduced the concept of quantum mechanics, who worked closely with Albert Einstein in formulating the Bose-Einstein Condensate, and after whom the famous theoretical particulate matter, the Boson Particle, is named, is a native of Kolkata And nestled between these 2 renowned eastern seaboard cities is the venerated town of Puri, the town that really spread Hinduism all over the world; the Hare Krishna movement has its inspiration at the famous Jagannath Temple of Puri where Bhaktivedanta AC Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKSON), spent most of his early years.