If Vaishnavism is so popular and wide spread in India, the credit must go to Sri Ramanuja, who took advantage of the ecstatic outpouring of the south Indian mystics, the Alvars, and produced a highly logical philosophy of knowledge soaked in devotion as the easiest means of God-realization.
When we have become free, we need not go mad and throw up society and rush off to die in the forest or the cave; we shall remain where we were, only we shall understand the whole thing.
-Swami Vivekananda