"The Ideal of Forgiveness"26

It is a very special day for me. Today I have completed my longest song, which is 186 lines. Kshamar Adarsha (“The Ideal of Forgiveness”) was a Bengali story written by Sri Aurobindo. I rendered it into Bengali verse. At the age of 13 I did it and Sri Aurobindo was very pleased. He said that I had capacity as a poet and I must continue. My version came out in a Bengali magazine. The name of the magazine was Sarathi (“Charioteer”).

That was in 1945 or 1946 and now, in 2002, I got the inspiration to set the words to music.


WSI 29. 10 August 2002, Aspiration-Ground, Jamaica, New York