Gauri told me that she was born Judy Ann Pinto on 16 November 1937 to Mona and Laurence (Udar) Pinto. They had just had their first darshan of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo a few months earlier. The Mother had requested that the baby should be born in the hospital in Bangalore where Udar’s aunt was a doctor, as there were no good hospitals in Pondicherry at that time. After six weeks in Bangalore, she was brought home to Pondicherry, but was fragile and prone to sickness. There was much concern over the new baby’s health, as she was not taking her food properly and was underweight. She did not sleep well during the night and kept her parents awake and concerned. Doctors were consulted and Udar and Mona entered into correspondence with the Mother regarding the matter. Gauri Pinto is a teacher in the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.   more »

Peter Heehs has a crisp and racy style; he comes straight to the essential points and there is a masterful weaving of historical data which hitherto has never been done in a biography of Sri Aurobindo. But that is about all that can be appreciated in this book, for he sets the ball rolling in the wrong direction right from the Preface. The reader is soon stunned at the innate hostility behind his clever presentation, or rather, misrepresentation of facts…

But here is a letter from Sri Aurobindo’s written to Dilip Kumar Roy in 1930: “What matters in a spiritual man's life is not what he did or what he was outside to the view of the men of his time (that is what historicity or biography comes to, does it not?) but what he was and did within; it is only that that gives any value to his outer life at all. It is the inner life that gives to the outer any power it may have and the inner life of a spiritual man is something vast and full and, at least in the great figures, so crowded and teeming with significant things that no biographer or historian could ever hope to seize it all or tell it. I see that you have persisted in giving a biography—is it really necessary or useful? The attempt is bound to be a failure, because neither you nor anyone else knows anything at all of my life; it has not been on the surface for men to see.”    more »