Shiva Responds to Manoj Das's Rejoinder to the Organiser

Shiva’s Hearty Greetings

To Padamshree Prof Manoj-Das-ji

For His Characteristic Tosh Against the Author of “The Enemy Within”

You dismiss Mr Chari’s “The Enemy Within” as a “vomit” of the “nasty and naked lies fed to him by unauthorised hostile elements” – as if Mr Chari had no other sources within and outside for this thesis.

You claim he “swallowed” this “dirt” because he has “never visited the Ashram” – as if by a single visit one robotically “imbibes the spirit sublime dominating its air” and knows all about Sri Aurobindo, Mother, Their Yoga, Their Ashram.

But you are yourself a proof that even after “over fifty years” here one can swallow “nasty and naked lies” fed by elements hostile to Sri Aurobindo, Mother, Their Yoga, and Their Ashram!

For instance:—

Do your credentials as a Padamshree and awardee of Sahitya Academy and Saraswati Samman, as a “responsible writer of personal columns in major Indian dailies”, and your “career (!) as an inmate of Sri Aurobindo Ashram”, justify the “sly motive” behind the falsity and vulgarity of your choice of words? Don’t this motive and choice of words prove that “the spirit sublime dominating this Ashram’s air has always been beyond your aspiration”?

Isn’t it true that throughout your “over fifty years” you have been absorbed in writing personal columns, books, magazines and in having extensive jaunts outside the Ashram to gain these awards and shunned the unpretentious but all-important collective life of this Ashram? Shunned because had you plunged amongst us up-front proletariat as liberally as your Chief Patron has, your bogus politesse would peel off in just a few days?

Can you deny that the Captain of the F Group of the Physical Education Dept (a crucial activity started by the Mother) was forced to throw you out of that group because you did not attend its weekly half-hour compulsory programme even for 3 days a year?

Isn’t there a more unpleasant reason why your ‘career’ as Assistant Editor of Mother India was practically still-born?

Isn’t there an even more unpleasant episode behind your ‘career’ as a Trustee being cut short?

Can you deny that you left your students in the Ashram School high and dry for weeks and months while you gave yourself wholeheartedly to outsiders who paid for your extravagant trips to their cities and lecture halls; isn’t that why you had to be ‘requested’ to stop taking any classes?

Have you the courage to admit that you have never known Sri Aurobindo and the Mother or practised Their Yoga as sincerely and scrupulously as Nolini, Champaklal, Dyuman, Purani, Rishabchand, Nirod, Amal and scores of others without leaving the Ashram even for a day, and therefore unlike theirs your talks and writings on these subjects are merely a siddha story-teller’s versions?

Have you the honesty and courage to accept that you have always spoken not of that Ashram uninterruptedly presided over by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother but of the Ashram presided over by the incumbent Managing Trustee?

Have you the honesty and courage to prove that all that has been written on this website about your shenanigans are not based on proven facts?

There! Almost ten proofs of your failure to imbibe the spirit sublime dominating the air of the subtle Ashram which the Mother has never stopped presiding over.

A few more just in case:—

You claim that “There may be [may be!] errors in Heehs” Lives of Aurobindo, that at certain places the author’s style of narration may be [may be!] disliked by some (my style of writing is also not in tune with that of the author’s [whose? Heehs’ or Chari’s?]), but that does not justify the propaganda carried on through quotations taken out of context. If at all harm could be done to Sri Aurobindo [because none can be done to Heehs and his guardian angels like you?], it is these fake enthusiasts who have done it.”

Doesn’t this mean that the 90+ serious lapses you honked about finding in Heehs’ book are “quotations taken out of context”, are not in any way connected with Sri Aurobindo’s life and works, and are “harm done to Sri Aurobindo”? Isn’t this why you have been whitewashing Heehs book by serialising your journalistic mutant of Heehs sacred work in Mother India?

Incidentally, why don’t you provide the irrefutable proofs by which you claim that Peter Heehs has never had anything to do with Doniger and Kripal?

Finally, are you sure that all these battles you so bravely have been fighting on behalf of your patrons is going to get you a Nobel Prize and your name will be printed in gold in all the history books?