CELEBRATING DILIP KUMAR ROY’S BIRTHDAY: 22nd JANUARY, 2012

THE MOMENTS OF FRAGRANCE And THE RIVER THAT BROUGHT US ALL TOGETHER

A soulful-singer, a musician, a poet, a lyricist, a man of letters and friendship, a true yogi- Dilip Kumar Roy once said: ‘I do not intend, as did John Milton,”to justify the ways of God to men”.  For as God is a real, throbbing Omnipresent Entity. His multiform divinity needs no ultramodern vindication, least of all when He is perceived solely through the devotee’s love. One who has love for Him does, in effect, say, a la Descartes: “I have glimpsed God with my Eye of Light, therefore I know what God is”. Similarly, one who has truly come to love Mother Ganga may well claim, mutatis mutandis: “Since  I feel in her the touch of the Divine I have no qualms about equating her with a goddess”. This is not an academic defense, but the acknowledgement of an experiential fact, to wit, that one whose heart has responded to the divine call of Mother Ganga can and does dispense once and for all with the services of an intellectual advocate. For he knows that what seems irrational to the mind may, in the last analysis, be suprarational and thus resoluble in the light of our intution. Indeed, are not all paradoxes resolved in the harmony of the Divine? To quote once again from Savitri (V, III):

The world is God fulfilled in outwardness.

The blue sea’s chant, the rivulet’s wandering voice

Are murmurs falling from the Eternal’s harp. – Sri Aurobindo

Years later I sang this song at Hardwar, where the blue-scarfed Ganga purls and dances along pauselessly, and my heart was filled with a deep exhaltation, so much so that on her bank I went composing song after song which I sang in ecstasy. …In one of these I wrote:

In my yearning heart, O Ganga, I

Sing but to appeal to thee:

Come thou to rend the veil that stands

Between thy Grace and me.

For then I’ll see thy light divine

In all and love all, Mother mine!

And learn to harken even in din

To thy soul’s own melody’.

CONSCIOUSNESS-ANALOGUE: THE RIVER THAT BROUGHT US ALL TOGETHER

Dadaji (Dilip Kumar Roy) and Mother Indira Devi at Haridwar

See the Dwarka threaded in his eyes                                                        

The haridwar the rishikesh in her eyes

Flowing with the swift ebb of tidal tears of the Ganges

Mother bathes the sun with a smile lost forever in nature’s arms

Or is it there where Narmada meets the sacred soul of its song?

The music rings in thy ears chanting like the waves

Carrying passages of dead earth from history’s charcoal years

Penciled at the bottom with a line or a signature

I am here in between the one and the many

Dancing my way to celebrate the nation

A friend is a friend is a friend is a friend

Love’s token are bird like wings seeking a hermitage

A wonderful carnival of primeval joy

A day when the young meets the old in their arms

A day when soldiers harp the flute of the lord

Canonizing the world eternal Hari OM!

A true seeker of love finds in light’s golden robe

The symbol of original bliss

That is the true mystic meaning of the word

Not in monastic meditation of solitude

But in life itself that has the true colours of trombone music

Rembrandt to Rolland to Sri Ramkrishna

Sri Aurobindo, Mother et al.

- Joy Roy Choudhury

BELOW: Sri Dilip Kumar Roy and his college friends in England, 1920. CLOCKWISE from lower left: D.K. Roy, K.P. Chatterji, Subhash Chandra Bose (Netaji), C.C. Desai.  Pictures courtesy Pilgrims of the Stars- Dilip Kumar Roy and Indira Devi/ Excerpt from Pilgrims of the Stars/ Dada ji & Indira Ma picture courtesy Hari Krishna Mandir Archives- website: http://www.harikrishnamandirindiraniloy.com/