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        'Heaven is my father, the earth my mother, and even a tiny creature such as myself finds an intimate place in their midst. All men are my brethren, and all things my companions.'

        These are all days of elections in Tamilnadu. No one can dispute that politicians run the world and badly, over both the long and short runs. When affairs become completely chaotic, as they commonly do, over a succession of short runs, a new set of politicians emerges to direct the political circus in some climactic caper of long-delayed reform, reaction or revolution. When this happens it is commonly said, in all seriousness, that history is being made. What goes on over the whole area is as endlessly fascinating as watching a cageful of impish chimpanzees apportioning among themselves a bunch of bananas.

        In the meantime, humanity pleads and suffers, and dark nuclear prospects loom ahead - all part of what is a farce on the surface, a tragedy underneath.

        No one understood this tragedy of the modern world better than Albert Schweitzer. He wrote with great poignancy and uncontrolled emotion: I am in complete disagreement with the spirit of the age because it is filled with disdain of thinking. This attitude can be explained to some extent by the fact that thought itself has never yet reached the goal which it must set before itself. The only possible way out of chaos is for us to come once more under the control of the ideals of true civilisation. These words were not written by a philosopher living in an ivory tower of cloistered seclusion, protecting his privacy with a barrier of abstractions, but by an active preacher, a creative musician and practical organ-builder who abandoned civilisation, as well as a successful career, to spend his life as a physician and surgeon among so called uncivilised creatures at the edge of the primeval jungle in equatorial Congo in Africa.

        Albert Schweitzer, one of the saintliest figures of modern times, was born on 14 January, 1875 at Kaysersberg in German Alsace. For several generations his family members had dedicated themselves to religion, music and education. At five, he began picking out melodies on the piano with one finger; at seven he played hymn-tunes on the parlour-organ and made up his own harmonies. He was barely nine when he substituted for the organist at a Church Service in Grunsbach. At 18, he entered Strasbourg University.

        During his college years, he was filled with an inextinguishable and undivided veneration for Bach and Jesus. At 22, he went to Paris to study philosophy at the University of Sorbonne and took his doctorate degree in philosophy in 1899 at the age of 24 with a dissertation on the religious philosophy of Kant. He began his career as a preacher at St. Nicholas Church in Strasbourg in 1899. He served in various high- ranking administrative posts from 1901 to 1912 in the Theological College of St Thomas, University of Strasbourg.

        His understanding of the origin and early Christian development of the Last Supper and Baptism led to a re-appraisal and in 1906 he published The Quest of the Historical Jesus, a book on which much of his fame as a theological scholar rests. At about the same time Schweitzer's monumental book on Bach appeared. Differing with those who ranked the great master of polyphony as a severe classicist, Schweitzer presented a Bach who was not only a poet but a tone-painter. As a corollary to his work on Bach, as well as his own performances, Schweitzer also published The Art of Organ Building and Organ Playing in Germany and France. He became an acknowledged authority on the reconstruction of old models of organs and the building of new ones. Designs were sent to him for approval or revision; he made many trips to different centres in Germany and France to help the restoration of ancient instruments. An acknowledged authority on organs and organ building even at the age of 30, he seemed to have a lifetime of security ahead of him.

        At 30, Schweitzer made a historically dramatic decision. He determined to become a medical student in order to go to equatorial Africa as a doctor. His friends and relatives were astounded. One of them tried to conceal his sense of shock with a flippant statement: In Europe you saved old organs from known death; in Africa you want to save old Negroes from unknown death. The fact of the matter is that Schweitzer had conceived of his plan years before. Even as a student at the University of Sorbonne, it had struck him as unfair that he should be allowed to lead a carefree life in the midst of global suffering.

        To begin with Schweitzer did not plan to leave Europe. For a while he thought of looking after abandoned children and educating them. He was sorry to note that the organisations which were in-charge of destitute and neglected children were in no mood to cooperate with him. He then considered devoting himself to tramps and discharged prisoners. At about this time, he came across an article in a magazine published by a Paris Missionary Society urging the need for Doctors in Gabon, the northern province of Congo in equatorial Africa. When Schweitzer finished reading this article, he knew that his search was over. His life's mission became clear for ever.

        Having decided to go to Africa as a medical missionary rather than as a pastor, Schweitzer in 1905 began the study of medicine at the University of Strasbourg. In 1913, he obtained his M D degree at the age of 38. Within one year he founded his hospital at Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa. In 1917 he and his wife were sent to a French internment camp as prisoners of war. Released in 1918, Schweitzer spent the next six years in Europe, preaching in his old church, giving lectures and concerts, taking medical courses, writing On the Edge of the Primeval Forest, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, Civilization and Ethics, and Christianity and the Religions of the World. Many of them are considered as great classics.

        Schweitzer returned to Lambaréné in 1924 and except for relatively short periods of time, spent the remainder of his life there. With the funds earned from his own royalties and personal appearance fees and with those donated from all parts of the world, he expanded the hospital to more than seventy buildings which by the early 1960s could take care of over 500 patients in residence at any one time.

        At Lambaréné, Schweitzer was not just a man but became a procession of men: doctor and surgeon in the hospital, pastor of a congregation, administrator of a village, superintendent of buildings and grounds, writer of scholarly books, commentator on contemporary history, musician, host to countless visitors and many other roles in succession. The honors he received were numerous, including the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt and honorary doctorates from many universities emphasising one or another of his achievements. The Nobel Peace Prize for 1952, having been withheld in that year, was given to Schweitzer on 10 December, 1953. The citation described him as 'The Twentieth Century's Matchless Human Being.'. With the $33,000 prize money, he started the leprosarium at Lambaréné. Albert Schweitzer died on 4 September, 1965, and was buried at Lambaréné itself.

        Albert Schweitzer will live in history as the inventor and originator of the now world famous phrase: 'Reverence for Life'. Let us hear Schweitzer himself in his own words as to how he arrived at this immortal phrase in 1917: I was invited to visit the ailing wife of a missionary living more than a hundred miles upstream the river. Lost in thought, I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal conception of the ethical which I had not discovered in any philosophy. I filled sheet after sheet with disconnected sentences, merely to keep myself concentrated on the problem. Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotami, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase: 'REVERENCE FOR LIFE'. The iron door had yielded: the path in the thicket had become visible. I had found my way to the idea in which affirmation of the world and ethics are contained side by side. I knew that the ethical acceptance of the world and of life, together with the details of civilisation contained in this concept, had a foundation in thought.

        In my view there is something dazzling about the real accomplishments and the moral grandeur of Albert Schweitzer. He is, as Winston Churchill called him, a 'Genius of Humanity'. One might even agree with those who call him the great man's great man. John Gunther wrote about him: Almost, if not quite Olympian, a universal man in the sense that Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe were universal men. Einstein paid this glorious tribute to Schweitzer: Nowhere have I ever found such an ideal union of goodness and passion for beauty as in Albert Schweitzer.

        Albert Schweitzer is regarded as a great man by most of those who know his life or his writings, but few of even these have thoroughly and critically explored either the depths of his thought or the significance of the complex relationship between his life and his thought.