After his acquittal in the Alipore Bomb Case, on 6 May 1909, Sri Aurobindo’s journalistic career started again with the weekly Karmayogin in English and Dharma in Bengali. The Karmayogin was essentially a review of, what the sponsors envisaged, national religion, literature, science, philosophy, and its first issue appeared on 19 June 1909, when just a few days hence we will be celebrating its centenary. The weekly was discontinued on 2 April 1910 when Sri Aurobindo was in a boat taking him to the French Pondicherry. Sri Aurobindo with his powerful pen commented, inter alia, on the political and other significant events of the time. The piece selected here is one of them. And there is something amazing about it even today.

It is often said by the disparaging and unseeing intellectuals, as if they have no life’s spirit breathing in them, that what Sri Aurobindo wrote a hundred years ago is applicable no more in the current situation, that his is ‘read-only’ text frozen for all time without dynamism, without relevance to the modern realities, that it is time-barred. This is to totally miss the essentials of those thoughts which come from a deeper fount of knowledge carrying in it the strength and efficacy of the timeless.

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