In 1959, after a brief visit with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Gaya, India, Wonwihari Prasad Bhoop wrote to him:
As I proceeded with [Stride Toward Freedom] I became more and more engrossed in it and I felt as if the Montgomery protest was going on before my eyes. When I had finished it, and seen in it the same unbending insistence—based on love—of man's equality, same dependence on God and other striking similarity of the events, narrated so nicely in your book, with the Indian movement for Independence under the great leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, the victory of which was not the victory of one community or one country upon the other but, victory of Truth, of Mankind itself.
On this conviction — this spirit of mankind's goodwill and wholeness — The Bhoop Foundation was built.
Read the full letter →Wonwihari Prasad Bhoop (1913–1999) was born in Gaya, Bihar. A follower of Vinoba Bhave and the Sarvodaya movement born from Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy, he donated his own land to India's landless poor in 1953. A scholar of Sanskrit, he devoted years to translating the Shrimad Bhagavatam into Hindi verse. His life was one of quiet conviction — that service, faith, and the dignity of all people were not separate pursuits but the same one. Today, The Bhoop Foundation carries this work forward from the same soil, building homes, hospitals, and shelters for the communities of Bihar.