The Parable of Two Birds "IN THE Upanishad it is said in a parable that there are two birds sitting, on the same bough, one of which feeds and the other looks on. This is an image of mutual relationship of the infinite being and the finite self. The delight of the bird which looks on is great, for it is pure and free delight. There are both of these birds in man himself, the objective one with its business of life, the subjective one with its disinterested joy of vision." That is how Rabindranath Tagore interprets the two-bird metaphor of Mundaka Upanishad. He seems to tell us that the act of seeing is more imaginative, more creative, more

PREFACE Kekoo D. Sethna was born in a Parsi family of Bombay on 25 November 1904 and in the Pondicherry Ashram as Sri Aurobindo's Amal-Kiran on 3 September 1930. By either reckoning we are late in honouring him today.   He has seen a thousand Full Moons long ago and, even as Amal-Kiran, has crossed four years back the traditional sixty for jubilation. Still he wanted us to wait for him to complete a hundred Autumns of the Vedic Rishis. Not that this is going to be too far away but, undoubtedly, it will be another grand occasion to celebrate. And therefore it is good not to miss at least the present one when he is becoming a nonagenarian. Amal-Kiran is a

Spirit-Illumined Son of Song In 1945 Prof. V.N. Bhushan brought out an anthology of poems in English by Indian writers, Kiranavali 1: The Peacock Lute. While presenting two of K.D. Sethna's poems the editor, after a quick biographical sketch, made a very perceptive, though brief, assessment of his poetry with its roots in the Aurobindonian spiritual aesthetics. We reproduce the same here, being one of the early evaluations of this genre of poetry which has yet to receive its full acclaim in the critical circles. -Editors SILENT, unobtrusive, and ever inward-looking, Mr. Sethna leads the vanguard of poetry in his famil

The Mind and Spirit of Our Age Dilip Kumar Roy's Interviews with Five World-Figures The review of Dilip Kumar Roy's Among the Great was first made by Amal Kiran in Mother India edited by him: We present in the following the article fully as it appears in his book The Indian Spirit and the World's Future. The clarity of thought and expression, as well as the grasp of issues involved, is absolutely remarkable; in the process, as the discussion proceeds, the alert commentator throws several sidelights on the eminent personalities concerned. - Editors Among the Great1 - a book of conversations packed with pleasure

A Priest of the Muses ...Carmina non prius Audita musarum sacerdos Virginibus puerisque canto. [Horace (Odes I)] THE appearance of a volume of poems of the highest quality is a rare event in any age, and in our own can be considered almost a miracle. Lovers of poetry can throw away their mourning clothes! The muse of poetry is not dead but has been sleeping, her dreams foreshadowing glorious things to come: Not only poems superbly crafted but a new kind of poetry, truly the carmina non prius audita - songs never heard before - for which Horace claimed the tide 'Priest of the Muse' in ancient times. Bu

( A letter from Albert Einstein) Page - 34 ( An Award ) Page - 35 ( A letter from Kathleen Raine) December 31st, 1993. Dear Friend, What a happiness to hear news of you after so long.... I have been reading your poems — what a beautifully produced book, with the Golden Bird (one of Rimbaud's?) on the cover. I at once read your introduction, most of the first section, and then, with great interest, the poems with the comments by Sri Aurobindo, whose insight into the different levels from which poems originate is so true and so valuable. As you know I share AE's view about

Sri Aurobindo and the Dominant Intellectual Paradigms of our Age IN HIS centenary tribute to Sri Aurobindo, K.D. Sethna (Mother India, 1972) observed: "This age, seen in its many-sided whole, will show itself secretly Aurobindonian. Sri Aurobindo will stand out as its truth-source and truth-focus, its natural gatherer-up and destined fulfiller." I present in this paper some evidence that will substantiate Sethna's claim about Sri Aurobindo. I shall show briefly what light Sri Aurobindo throws on some of the most influential intellectual paradigms of our age, such as, the liberal conception of man enshrined in the Western democracies,

An Introductory Note Apropos of a Sneer at the Subject by Auden Amal Kiran as historical scholar and literary analyst is unmistakably evident in his attempt to solve the enigmas of Shakespeare's sonnets, as presented in his "Two Loves" and "A Worthier Pen" published in 1984 by Amold-Heinemann. Not only does he dismiss W.H. Auden's pronouncement that such an undertaking is a foolish waste of time, but very methodically cuts the obscure ground to get at a possible clue to the problem. The following prefatory note by him is quite illustrative of this sharp researcher's painstaking work which perhaps needs a proper recognition in the respe

Frontispiece: Amal Kiran in his Study (September 1994) Amal-Kiran Poet and Critic Edited by Nirodbaran and R. Y. Deshpande

-35_The Locus of K D Sethna^s Poetry.htm The Locus of K.D. Sethna's Poetry IN 1927 a young Indo-Anglian poet drawn by the new spiritual philosophy of Sri Aurobindo came to his Ashram in Pondicherry. The name of the young man was K.D. Sethna. He was twenty-three and two years earlier had published a book of poems. He was not happy with the life he had been leading; he had felt that he "had waited overmuch in the ordinary life".1 In the presence of Sri Aurobindo he found what he aspired to. Sri Aurobindo does not teach a world-shunning life-negating spirituality.  "It is an error," he says, "to think that spirituality is a thing divorced from life."2 And Sethna knew th