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Sri Aurobindo was born in Calcutta, India to a Kayastha family, on 15 August 1872 to Dr. Krishna Dhan Ghose, District Surgeon of Rangapur, Bengal and Swarnalata Devi, the daughter of Brahmo religious and social reformer, Rajnarayan Basu. Dr. Ghose chose the middle name Akroyd to honour his friend Annette Akroyd. Aurobindo spent his first five years at Rangapur, where his father had been posted since October 1871. Dr. Ghose, who had previously lived in Britain and studied medicine at King's College, Aberdeen, was determined that his children should have an English education and upbringing free of any Indian influences. In 1877, he therefore sent the young Aurobindo and two elder siblings - Manmohan and Benoybhusan - to the Loreto Convent school in Darjeeling. Sri Aurobindo was an Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, and poet. He joined the Indian movement for freedom from British rule and for a duration became one of its most important leaders, before developing his own vision of human progress and spiritual evolution. The central theme of Sri Aurobindo's vision is the evolution of life into a "life divine": Man is a transitional being. He is not final. The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of Nature's process. The principal writings of Sri Aurobindo include The Life Divine, considered his greatest work of metaphysics, and The Synthesis of Yoga. In poetry, his principal work is Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol in blank verse. Sri Aurobindo was one of the most talented as well as prolific spiritual leaders of India. Along with that, he was a brilliant writer, who published 68 volumes of sophisticated literary knowledge. All the works and teachings of Shri Aurbindo that we see today were written by him within a span of four years. After that, he never contributed even a single word to the field of literature. As per Sri Aurobindo biography, he adopted complete silence in the later years of his life, speaking on the rarest of occasions. Address: , INDIA |