Sri Aurobindo: Life and Thought by Susmit Pani

"Mine is not Byron's lightning spear;
Nor Wordsworth's lucid strain
Nor Shelly's lyric pain
Nor Keats, the poet without peer
I by the Indian Waters vast
Did glimpse the magic of the past,
And on the oaten-pipe I play
Wrapped echoes of an earlier day"

If we look at the beginning of Indian Society, the far off Vedic Age which we no longer understand, for we have lost that meaning, we see that everything is symbolic

     But symbolic of what? He explains, The symbol there is of something which man feels to be present behind himself and his life and his activities. The Divine, the Gods, the vast and deep unnameable, a hidden living and mysterious nature of things. All his religious and social institutions, all the moments and phases of his life are to him symbols. In which he seeks to express what he knows or guesses of the mystic influences that are behind his life, and shape, and govern, or at least intervene in its movements  

Etymologically,Veda is derived from the root "VID" which implies to know. The Veda means the source of knowledge, or knowledge infinite and eternal. Thus. the Vedas are not just the collection of hymns for rituals or in the praise of Gods, they are the embodiment of eternal knowledge. The Vedic rishis are not their composers, they are the seers and the mantras are the embodiment of their visions. Vedas are impersonal and handed over down the ages in the form of "Sruti" or the word form to interpret the Infinite and the  Supreme,.

In modern times, Vedas are taken as a source of reconstructing the history of the Vedic times. 

     The philologist looks into it for scooping out like and unlike words  

     The historian reconstructs the origin of the aryans

     The anthropologist reads into it, the earliest forms of Nature worship

     The philosopher finds solace in the highest spiritual and mystic expressions

     The logician tries to reduce it into a set of formulae

     The literary critic looks at it as one of the earliest literary work known to us

i.e., Vedas are considered a magnum opus for many disciplines and each reads into it, it's own angularities

"Ir is irrelevant to me what Max Muller thinks of the Veda or what Sayana thinks of the Veda. I would prefer to know what Veda says for itself, and if there is any light there on the unknown, or on the infinite, to follow the ray until I come face to face with that which it illuminates"

     Opinions are not knowledge, but only the spotlights on knowledge. The Veda is primarily intended to serve for spiritual enlightenment and self-culture. It is therefore, this sense, which has first to be restored.

Vedas  are therefore, revelatory knowledge, and talks of battles and victories of the Human spirit as it climbs higher and higher planes of thought thus help bringing you closer to the the God within (Pure Consciousness) and to destroy the devourer, the expresser of evil (Material Pursuits and Emotional agony)

Diaspora Literature - In Search of a Room of One's Own

The Home as a Seat of Longing and Desire in Diaspora

What is a Home? On the one hand 'home' is a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination. In this sense it is a place of return, even if it is possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as a place of 'origin'. On the other hand home is also a lived experience of a locality.Its sounds and smells,its heat and dust, balmy summer evenings, sombre grey skies in the middle of the day.... all this as mediated by the historically specific of every day social relations. In other words, the varying experience of pains and pleasures, the terrors and contentment or the higher and humdrums of everyday lived cultures that mark the how, "there is no place like home"

"Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the homes of the past, so that the image of the dream home is opposed to that of the childhood home... Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of the dream home  that we shall live in... later, always later,... so much later in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a home that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the home we were born in would lead to thoughts _ serious sad thoughts_ and not in dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

"Within the frame of contemporary diaspora the notion of 'home' and when a location becomes home are therefore linked when the issues related to inclusion or exclusion which tend to be subjectively experienced depending on circumstances. When does a location become home? How can one distinguish between "feeling at home" and taking a claim to a place as one's own?

The notion of the home is therefore very complex and is related to the subjective emotion of nostalgia The concept of home in the diaspora is intricate, complex and multifaceted characterising plurality of homes and plurality of belongings. The notion of diaspora can represent multiple, plurilocal thus avoiding the  ideas of fixity, boundedness and nostalgic exclusivity traditionally implied with the term 'home' i.e, a constant apprehension arises between where you are from and where you are at which leads the diasporic subjects to form their own space.