Sri Aurobindo to Dilip - Volume II

Note of Thanks

TO : MOTHER AND SRI AUROBINDO

To: Revered Gobindo Gopal Mukhopadhyaya, Sanskritist, musician, who personally knew many spiritual personalities of the epoch. Without his constant affectionate encouragement we do not know when these letters would have seen the light of day. By the way, it was another Mukhopadhyay, Dr. Joygopal, who gave Dilip the final push when he was hesitating to take the plunge, because he had not got any- thing 'tangible' from his Guru: "You are bargaining with the Divine?" The shaft went home, says Dilip.

To: Sri Shankar Bandopadhyay of Hari Krishna Mandir Trust, Pune, without whose sweet collaboration, nothing could have been properly done.

To: The Hari Krishna Mandir Trust for entrusting us with this work.

To: Sri Nirmal Nahar, for his prompt reply to our many queries. He shed light on many points and personalities for us.

Us means: Maryse Prat, Diane Lemoulant and me, yours truly. In fact, without Maryse's attentive deciphering (not easy), typing and organizing the sequence of these letters, we would have been floating rudderless on a sea of papers. Because many of these letters were undated, and then some were scattered here and there in scrapbooks. A real jigsaw puzzle! Diane Lemoulant brought to bear her particular quality to this work by reading, checking, verifying. As for me, I added my bit, since I knew many of those then living in the Ashram.

Page 9

We three made a good team. So again, at the end, our heartfelt gratitude to Mother and Sri Aurobindo who brought us together.

So as not to over delay the publication of this second volume of letters, it became necessary to somewhat change our original plan. Instead of three, there will now be four volumes. The present volume has letters from 1934 and 1935 only. And when we could not fit in anywhere some undated, incomplete letters, we chose to put them in the Appendix along with the letters that should have gone in the first volume, but were omitted through oversight. Just a minimum of editing has been done. As we found many more of Dilip's questions than for the first volume, they have been included. The reader will certainly enjoy his racy style of writing to Sri Aurobindo to which the Guru often replied in kind.

It may interest the reader to see the faces of the sadhaks whose names figure in several letters. We have included a few pictures.

To give the reader an inkling of the painstaking work needed, a page from one of the scrapbooks has been included.

Thank you all very much.

S.N.

6 October 2004

Page 10