-40_Little Known Facets of the  Immortal Diamond.htm Little Known Facets of the Immortal Diamond IF THE term "myriad-minded" could be applied to anybody with justice, Amal richly deserves it. It is not uncommon to find jacks of all trades with a kind of shallow omniscience.  To be a first-rate poet uttering overhead notes, a superb critic with a mastery over "the heart and art of poetry", a rare type of historian with imagination and insight, a keen student of scientific thought and for some time even a commentator on the contemporary political scene is to be only in the truest sense of the term an Aurobindonian. On the occasion of his ninetieth birthday it is good t

The Legend of Amal Kiran FROM the time I came to Pondicherry as a small boy in the year 1946, I had heard the name of Amal Kiran together with that of Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, of Dilip Kumar Roy, Arjava and a few others as the poets inspired and moulded by Sri Aurobindo himself. Those were indeed the halcyon days of the Ashram at least as far as the Arts and Culture were concerned, for then it was a case of turn but a corner and start a poet. One could not take a step without brushing against a famous poet or painter or musician or thinker or scholar. Nolinikanto, Nishikanto, Dilip Kumar, Bhismadev, Sahana Devi, Monod-Herzen, Sanjivan,

Section One A Content of Warm Sunshine Page-3 Blessing from The Morher Page-5 ( A letter from Sri Aurobindo) Page - 7 N. B: The Letter was written to Amal Kiran on 28. 2. 28 - Editors Page - 8 ( Diary record of an interview and two letters ) Page - 9 Sri Aurobindo's reply written in pencil: Your account of the conversation with Mother is quite accurate. Mother is letting you go now because she t

My Wonderful Teacher THE MOTHER arranged my reading Savitri with Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna) in 1962. Sri Aurobindo had first introduced Savitri to Amal in private drafts and written to him most of the letters that are now published along with the epic. For the first time Amal and I met in 1961 upstairs in the passage which connects the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's rooms. I casually asked him about a chessboard, because the Mother and I were doing something on the theme. He drew it and made me understand it. When we started our reading of Savitri, some interested people warned Amal against me and asked him to discontinue. A

-08_Amal Kiran^s Letter to Sri Aurobindo on Savitri.htm Amal Kiran's Letter to Sri Aurobindo on Savitri We reproduce in the following Amal Kiran's letter to Sri Aurobindo on Savitri as it appears in the Sri Aurobindo Circle (Special Fiftieth Number) of 1994. The editor's note, briefly excerpted, introducing the correspondence between them precedes the letter. Sri Aurobindo's reply as originally dictated to Nirodbaran is not reproduced here. — Editors (Sri Aurobindo used to send by instalments, from 25 October 1936 onward for some time, a handwritten copy of his Savitri as it stood then to Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna), and it grew an established, practice that the

A Latinised Adjective in English A Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo Here is a brief but bold discussion between Amal Kiran and Sri Aurobindo showing the depth of their scholarship in matters English but, more than that, a very unconventional Guru-Shishya relationship which would have been dubbed arrogant, if not blasphemous, on part of the disciple by the earlier tradition. - Editors A HUMOROUS discussion with Sri Aurobindo about a Latinised adjective for poetic use may not be out of place here. For it links up ultimately with a poem of his own. I put to him questions and he replied. In my lines — This heart grew brighter w

Approaching the Poetry of Amal Kiran THE Collected Poems (1993) of Amal Kiran appropriately takes the name of his very first anthology, The Secret Splendour. Over more than four decades, "the secret splendour" of Amal Kiran's poetry has been unveiled in a number of collections, now brought together for the benefit of poetry lovers: The Secret Splendour, Overhead Poetry, The Adventure of the Apocalypse, Altar and Flame, Uncollected Works, Eros/Known and Unknown and a selection from the earlier days named Images from Early Moods. A collection of this nature that spans practically a whole lifetime is bound to display variation in ter

A Glimpse of the Pure Ray A FEW glimpses of Shri Amal, Amalda, Amalbhai or Amalji ? Well, considering his imposing personality, I should call Shri Amaldabhaiji! But then, being what he is, he wouldn't like any of these appendages - so Amal, ‘pure’ and simple! Though I feel that it is a privilege to write on Amal, when asked to do so I hesitated because there are so many big people writing about his colossal knowledge, his generosity in literary help, his wonderful sense of humour, his capacity to laugh at himself, his cheerfulness and last but not the least, his formidable memory. I was just wondering what to write - n

The Triple Labour of Association TO HAVE known Amal Kiran was a grace, an unanticipated and clearly an undeserved benediction. For how is one to anticipate or deserve an encounter destined to alter the entire focus of one's life? That providential meeting occurred for me more than twenty years ago at a critical moment of my life when a great difficulty faced me in publishing my two volumes, Glimpses of the Mother's Life. Amal Kiran opened his heart and poured love and compassion on a budding writer. I started compiling from 1973 the Mother's autobiographical accounts. I was fortunate enough that I had the privilege to have guid

SECTION TWO His study of Divining Thought A SELECTION FROM THE WRITINGS OF AMAL-KIRAN According to Horace's Ars Poetica a good poem comes both with spontaneous naturalness and well-cultivated craft, combining a lot of book-learning and inspiration. Amal-Kiran's poetry is not only good, but is something more than that: it breathes the joy of the spirit in its wide-ranging manifestive life-urges and is luminous, even at times profoundly revelatory, carrying delights and splendours of the psychic-lyrical, or of the overhead. It is trans-Horatian. Indeed, to put it more explicitly, it is Aur