Atreyee Poddar
Mother Teresa was a Catholic nun best known for her work among the poor in Kolkata. In 1950, she founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious group dedicated to caring for the sick, the homeless, and those with no one to look after them. What began as a small effort in Kolkata gradually grew into an international organisation working in many countries.
Mother Teresa was born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje which is now North Macedonia. She came to India when she was 18 as a Loreto nun. When she left the convent in 1948 to work in Kolkata’s slums, she had basic medical training, a few rupees, and no institutional backing.
Her first school had no building. She taught children in the open, writing lessons in the dust. When she began picking up the sick and dying from the streets, there was no formal system — just a growing network of volunteers.
Her critics, who were journalists and doctors have raised concerns about medical practices in some of her homes, including limited pain management and basic facilities despite having big donations.
At the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 1979, she used that global platform to condemn abortion, and called it the greatest destroyer of peace. Her humanitarian work and conservative Catholic beliefs were inseparable.
Mother Teresa died in 1997 and was canonised as a saint by the Catholic Church in 2016 which was unusually fast by Vatican standards.