Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1937

Letter ID: 1911

Sri Aurobindo — Nirodbaran Talukdar

April 15, 1937

We are short of three persons for vaccination; I propose to make them up tomorrow.

Make up – how? I thought you had daily only enough for ten vaccinations, and, if all were not used, those remaining over have to be thrown away?

Well, don’t discuss the effectivity of vaccination, if you don’t like, but please enlighten us with your Supramental Light as we are rather hidebound in our glorious “science”.

No time for showing the glorious Science its errors. Too busy trying to get the supramental Light down to waste time on that. Afterwards, sir, afterwards.

Sada & Co. refuse the vaccination point blank! Till now none has succeeded in doing them, they say! Well?

Nothing to be said, unless you tell them to go and be d – d in their own way!

After reading so many Bengali poems and Dilipda’s learned lessons on metre, you ought not to say that you are not an expert in Bengali metre, Sir!

Read them? Flip-flopped through them, you mean – how could all that strenuous technicality remain in the head?

Look at this Bengali sonnet. How is it?

Very fine indeed except for the concluding couplet which might be called a flat drop! What the deuce, sir!? What kind of coupletitis is this illness of yours? anaemia finalis.

Another letter from C, saying that your chiding had wonderful effect, Sir. Lots of worries gone! So it is not my “abortioning”, Sir! [10.4.37] Yours entirely. I am not used to these things, not yet, at least! It was, by the way, “chastising”. Gracious, chastising is miles away from “abortioning”!

Can’t be, can’t be! You must have misread it. I stick to the abortion.

Can the observing of these moral obligations which C mentions be a help in Yoga?

Yes, sir, if done in the right spirit, it will.

J says you called her also “sir”!

So I did – but I was answering to you.

Guru, this poem seems a very fine poem, though I can’t follow it.

You are a very difficult follower. It is because you follow your own mind instead of identifying with the mind of the poem.

[Against a portion of the interpretation I had cancelled:]

!!! What a confusion!

... Rather complicated, this.

No, sir; it is your mind that has got complicated.

... After a talk with J, the poem seems clear and my criticism wrong ...

Luckily I thought of reading the end first, otherwise I would have had to swear at you at length all the way instead of growling slightly here and there.