nowhere. Not all of course – but still. However, your novel seems to have been a great success in spite of all the Parichits [acquaintances] in Calcutta.Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
Volume 2. 1934 — 1935
Letter ID: 494
Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar
October 2, 1934
Sorry about Niren, but que voulez-vous? [What would you?] Men were like that ever; the little ego first and the rest nowhere. Not all of course – but still. However, your novel seems to have been a great success in spite of all the Parichits [acquaintances] in Calcutta.
As to Radhakrishna, I don’t care whether he is right or wrong in his eagerness to get the blessed contribution from me. But the first fact is that it is quite impossible for me to write philosophy to order. If something comes to me of itself, I can write, if I have time. But I have no time. I had an idea of writing to Adhar Das1 pointing out that he was mistaken in his criticism of my ideas about consciousness and intuition and developing briefly what was my idea about these things. But I have never been able to do it. I might as well think of putting the moon under my arm, Hanumanlike – though in his case it was the sun – and going for a walk. The moon is not available and the walk is not possible. It would be the same if I promised anything to Radhakrishna – it would not get done, and that would be much worse than a refusal.
And the second fact is that I do not care one button about having my name in any blessed place. I was never ardent about fame even in my political days; I preferred to remain behind the curtain, push people without their knowing it and get things done. It was the confounded British Government that spoiled my game by prosecuting me and forcing me to be publicly known as a “leader”. I don’t believe in advertisement except for books and in propaganda except for politics and patent medicines. But for serious work it is a poison. It means either a stunt or a boom – and stunts and booms exhaust the thing they carry on their crest and leave it lifeless and broken high and dry on the shores of nowhere – or it means a movement. A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damned nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. It is what has happened to the “religions” and the reason of their failure. If I tolerate a little writing about myself, it is only to have a sufficient counter-weight in 
that amorphous chaos, the public mind, to balance the hostility that is always aroused by the presence of a new dynamic Truth in this world of ignorance. But the utility ends there and too much advertisement would defeat that object. I am perfectly “rational”, I assure you, in my methods and I do not proceed on a mere personal dislike of fame2.
This “Contemporary Philosophy,” British or Indian, looks to me very much like book-making and, though the “vulgarisation” of knowledge – to use the French term – by bookmaking may have its use, I prefer to do solid work and leave that to others. You may say that I can write a solid thing in philosophy and let it be book-made. But even the solid tends to look shoddy in such surroundings. And, besides, my solid work at present is not philosophy but something less wordy and more to the point. If that work gets done, then it will propagate itself so far as propagation is necessary – if it were not to get done, propagation would be useless.
These are my reasons. However, let us wait till the book is there and see what kind of stuff it is.
1 Adhar Das: a Professor of Philosophy at Calcutta University.
2 The typed letter continues with the following passage: “If and so far as publicity serves the Truth, I am quite ready to tolerate it; but I do not find publicity for its own sake desirable.” On Himself, Cent. Ed., p. 376.