Page 12 - All India Magazine Jan-2026

Stalin-Mussolini style, it is not mine; the only trait I share
with the "grim" people is obstinacy in following out my aim
in life, but I do it quietly and simply and have always done.
Don't set up some gloomy imaginations and take them for
the real Aurobindo.

Divine humor
By the way, if you get such imaginations like the Nrisinha
Hiranyakashipu one, I shall begin to think that the Over-
mind has got hold of you also. I don't know the gentleman
(Nrisinha) personally, but only by hearsay; if he was there I
certainly did not recognise him. I always thought of him as
a symbol — or perhaps a divinised Neanderthal man who
sent for Hiranyakashipu (whoever H. was) and cut him
open in the true Neanderthal way! For myself I was sitting
there very quiet and as pacific as anybody at Geneva itself
— more so in fact and receiving the stream of people with
much inner amiability and, outwardly, a frequent "lip- smile
"— so where the deuce was room for Nrisinha there? Be-
sides it seems to me that I have long overpassed the man-
beast stage of evolution — perhaps I flatter myself? — so
again why Nrisinha. At the most there may have been some
Power behind me guarding against the stream of "grim" dif-
ficulties — really grim these — which had been cropping up
down to the Darshan eve. If so, it was not part of myself nor
was I identified with it. So exit Nrisinha.
CWSA 35: 48-49 Sri Aurobindo

12 All India Magazine, January 2026