On 4 July 2012 Director-General Rolf Heuer of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva) made an announcement about the discovery of a particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs Boson. According to the theory given 45 years ago we have an explanation as how matter acquires its mass. It involves this boson. Since then there has been a determined chase to track it down in the laboratory. Experiments carried out by two teams using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN statistically confirm the predictions. "It's really an incredible thing," exclaims Higgs himself, and Heuer...

The House of Wisdom by Jim Al-Khalili published by Penguin Press (2011) talks in its preface of "an age in which great geniuses pushed their frontiers of knowledge forward to such an extent that their work shaped civilisations to this day." Though perhaps "shaped civilisations to this day" is too enthusiastic a statement, this "pushing frontiers of knowledge" essentially belongs to the early Abbasid period of the Islamic glory. "I shall address," says the author, "many questions that have long intrigued scholars of the history of science. How much science, for instance, did the Arabs actually...

Savitri is the Consciousness of the Beyond with the incarnate soul's urge and claim for the realization of the spirit's verities in the life here. The divine Savitri takes human birth as Aswapati's daughter, comes as the Word of Realisation. In it is the twofold Yoga of the material opening to the spiritual as much as the spiritual entering into the material. Aswapati keeps the ground ready for the willed work to be undertaken, and to invoke the transcendental Power to take the mortal birth; it is she who will come as Savitri to carry out the divine Action. Her task is to win victory over...

About the Talks on the Symbol Dawn, the opening canto of Sri Aurobindo's epic savitri, it is stated that these could be an essential tool for Savitri-lovers to develop the right perspective and context for Savitri-reading. It has not only synthesized a lot of earlier contributions, but also developed many essential original articulations. The concept of Savitri's yajna synthesises Savitri-readings with the Vedic perspective as, for instance, we have in the Purusha Sukta when seen as an Aurobindonian interpretation of the cosmology that goes with it. But perhaps certain aspects also need be...

It may look somewhat absurd to scoop out sonnet structures from an epic narrative, but perhaps in the bright amplitude of the epic itself are present innumerable sub-realms that have their own compelling individualities. These are like different rooms and chambers and halls and verandahs in a royal palace, in the White House, in the Palace of Versailles, or more appropriately the world of South Indian Temples or the famous set of Ajanta Caves. By the very definition of an epic we can say that it has a rich abounding multidimensionality representing re-creatively the thousand moods and manners...

We present here the text of the First Edition of Savitri with accent-marks which are indicated with the font underlined. The metrical scansion of the lines is however left to the individual's perception. But we should also mention that we are not considering half or partial accents which on occasions can fall on vowels in the rhythmic flow of the theme. It must be further noted that some accents and stresses could change from context to context, and from person to person. However, the important consideration has to be articulation based on clear units of rhythm. Subjective element in the...

Sri Aurobindo's epic Savitri opens with the Symbol Dawn and immediately in the first two sentences poses the problem of this creation. It says that the Gods are not yet awake and that the mind of Night is standing in the way of the divine Event. The divine Event is the manifestation of a new creation upon earth, manifestation in the mortal world. If that is to happen then the mind of Night should be first dislodged from the path. It is only then that the transforming Gods will set themselves into action. The Event will proceed not with the waking of the Gods but with the removal of the mind...

Sri Aurobindo considered Savitri as his "main work" and out of his precious time allotted every day two and half hours for its composition. This was during the late 1940s when the tempo of work had speeded up considerably, as if it had to be speeded up in that way. In fact he was otherwise engaged with it almost for fifty years though with some long gaps in between. Today we have a poem written in pentametric blank verse form running almost into twenty-four thousand lines. Divided into twelve Books, -as is the Western tradition for an epic, -it has forty-eight Cantos and an Epilogue. Part I...