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10 : PILGRIMS OF THE STARS It is often observed that when a biographer writes about somebody's life with whom he is personally connected in one way or the other, inevitably, he reveals the facts of his own life, too, directly or indirectly. The biographer thus becomes partially an autobiographer.
This applies to Dilip Roy, too. All of his biographies, in English or Bengali, reveal the traits of his own personality. The peculiarity of Dilip Roy is that his autobiography, too, reveals biographies. What we discover here is portraits of some personalities who had been shaping influences at work upon his mind. Thus there are the sketches of Subhas Chandra Bose, Romain Rolland, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo and others. Here as nowhere else so completely, he has presented things in a proper chronological order. In his 'Introduction' to Pilgrims of the Stars, he says:
"It was under the illumined aegis of my guru Sri Aurobindo that I first blossomed into a writer of novels, plays, poems and biographies, impelled through it all by my inveterate urge to limn the human greatness that seemed to accost me at every turn. I have never considered this inclination of mine to be mere hero worship, especially as Krishna Himself declares in the Gita:
yad-yad vibhutimat sattvam shrimad-urjitam eva va tat-tat evagaccha tvam mama tejomsha-sambhavam.
(10:41)
Which means:
Wherever thou findest a flowering of grace, Glory or opulence that thrills the eye,
Know: they all stem from a gleam of My sun-splendor."! He adds:
"Some of our readers will be familiar with my older work Among the Great where I have written at length about the great personalities whose ideas and friendship have had a significant impact on my life. For reasons of space as well as to avoid needless repetition, I have here greatly curtailed such biographical material, except, of course, in the case of Sri Aurobindo."
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