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Journalism of Courage
It was 1983, my last year in college. I was a good student, a topper. All set to go to the UK for higher studies in literature. And even then, in that heady romanticism of early youth, I recall that the first experience of reading words that were to echo a hundred times in the caverns of my being: man is a transitional being. It was nearly four years later that I returned to Sri Aurobindo and that stupendous theme of his life-work that envisioned man8217;s ascent to a 8220;divine supermanhood8221;.
Divine supermanhood? Something had happened when I8217;d read those words, something that took me more than ten years to figure out. I knew I had found the theme of my life. All that remained then was to set out on the journey and follow the theme to its source. That8217;s when I came to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Delhi, having 8220;renounced8221; the everyday life of the world in a fit of existential madness, searching for that Holy Grail of divine supermanhood. But everyone around me was busy living the same mundane existence.
It is still very simple. Except that grown-ups now look and behave like grown-ups. And children are just beginning to behave a bit like grown-ups. Maybe it8217;s the times. Maybe it8217;s Delhi. Maybe it8217;s the soul itself, following some secret law of its own, working out things of which we have no idea. Because mirambika is not just an education system, it is a laboratory of the future, a laboratory tentatively walking towards divine supermanhood.
The writer is a former principal of mirambika, which completed 25 years last week
