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.
This world is nothing. It is at best only a hideous caricature, a shadow of the Reality. We must go to the Reality. Renunciation will take us to It.
-Swami Vivekananda