The greatest American leader was an African-American

See that’s the thing. Even though I have never driven a taxi in my life I can still claim to be a historian. Actually I can also claim to be the founder of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives but that I plan to do only a few years later after a gradual build-up of phoney qualifications.

Being the sentimental, fundamentalist, religiously bigoted, potentially schizophrenic Indian historian, I am condemned to perceive the beautiful in the banal and thrill to the the divine inspiration pouring out from human lips.

The current crop of American or Americanized/Westernized (e.g. Ashis Nandy) historians and sundry other mechanical tools of the mental nature, i.e. intellectuals, in India are the exact opposite. They strain their eyeballs and use microscopic tweezers to painstakingly ferret out banal little details from behind the image of beauty and then distort and magnify these out of all proportion thus obscuring the beauty itself.

But then the One Divine Self (Mother Sri Aurobindo) is there in the American historian as well and a time, a birth must come eventually when he will truly suffer the delight of being an Indian wherever he finds himself, in America or in India. Of course this could just be the schizophrenic (err… psychic?) being in me doing the talking… 🙂