The History of the Ashram School (3) ― Kittu Reddy

We shall first review the developments in the School from the year 1959.

As already stated earlier, the Free Progress System was introduced on an experimental basis in 1959 at the Secondary level;  from there it evolved to a surer and larger base in 1961; a small group of students were trying out this method and the Mother named it Vers la Perfection. However the whole of the secondary section was not following the Free System. One section – in fact, the  larger section – was still continuing with the old method. The school at the secondary level was thus divided into two sections.

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The Medical Negligence of Vishnu Lalit – by Bireshwar Choudhury

The deep-rooted fear that has spread in Sri Aurobindo Ashram is that the Ashram Nursing Home, headed by Dr. Dilip Datta and Dr Salila Patnaik, provides a one-way ticket to Heaven. But the journey itself is not so enjoyable considering the medical trauma that you have to go through: the lack of basic health care, the rude behaviour of some of the nurses you have to put up with, the frequent references to Divine Providence by the Chief Medical Officer when he does not want to spend money on you for referrals to specialists, and finally his constant exhortation to “Have faith in the Mother” when the patient does not have enough faith in him as a medical practitioner. The recent case of Vishnu Lalit is one such blatant case of medical negligence.  

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Sri Aurobindo’s Accident in November 1938 ― by Krish Patwardhan

In the paragraph below from the Lives of Sri Aurobindo (pp. 381-82), Peter Heehs not only misrepresents Sri Aurobindo’s relation with the Mother but gets one of the most basic facts wrong in the life of Sri Aurobindo, namely, the fracture of his right leg in the early hours of 24 November, 1938. Heehs, disregarding the factual accounts of Nirodbaran and Champaklal (the two disciples who personally served Sri Aurobindo during his last twelve years), writes that it was “a fracture of the left thigh close to the knee”! I wonder how he got his facts so wrong despite all the hagiographic fanfare about his 40 years of research on Sri Aurobindo.

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Analysis of the Preface of Peter Heehs’ "The Lives of Sri Aurobindo" (Bio-2 – part 5) – A Zombified Disciple

Murders in the Land of the Naïve – 7

Heehs wrote Sri Aurobindo: A Brief Biography, OUP, 1989 (Bio-1), The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, CUP, 2008, (Bio-2) & much else in the same vein.[1] I analyse his prefaces using his device critical openness of a seeker of truth & his diktat: Biographers must take their documents as they find them…, paying as much attention to what is written by the subject’s enemies as by his friends, not giving special treatment even to the subject’s own version of events. Accounts by the subject…need to be compared against other narrative accounts…that do not reflect [his] point of view. The pseudonym ‘Marcher’ is a fusion of his forebears Catherine Mayo (1867-1940) & William Archer (1856-1924), though Marcherism – degrading the Sanatana Dharma & vilifying the greatest children of Mother India – was born centuries before Mayo-Archer. The entire credit for his thriving at the expense of his subject and his ashram goes to his Daemon, a special emission of “the falsehood of the mental, vital and physical Powers and Appearances that still rule the earth-Nature”.[2]

All text in Italics is from Bio-1, Bio-2 & their prefaces; all in Roman is mine. I have often interspersed my comments in Roman within Marcher’s text which is always in italics.

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The History of the Ashram School (2) – Kittu Reddy

We shall now go back in time to see how the Free Progress System was introduced in the school.

From the year 1959, many tentative experiments were being made in the Free Progress System. These attempts were first made on a small scale with a small number of students and teachers who were willing to try out the experiment. The source of inspiration for these experiments was in the writings and talks of Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

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