Dilettante's litany

• The whole corpus of Sri Aurobindo’s writings is yet to be published.
• Even when published, a large body of unused/discarded material will never see the light of the day.
• Under the chronological approach, the older texts count as inferior/immature to the later ones. This is suspect.
• Unrevised writings that have been published can never attain the requisite prestige.
• Specific texts that were expressly barred from being published by Sri Aurobindo, supposedly, don’t reflect his final/mature views.
• Revision of Savitri is a vastly contested subject now and seems intractable.
• Record of Yoga, too, is dogged by controversies as regards the propriety of making esoteric private notes public.
• Conversations continue to be accorded authenticity despite being written from memory.
• Stray Aphorisms, though unrevised, are often lobbed to win arguments and squash opponents.
• Letters have been compiled in a generalized fashion by eclipsing context and personal references.
• All letters of Sri Aurobindo (including those of the correspondents) during the last five years could be a great document, but no such hope.
• Some letters appear in fragments in different sections/volumes.
• Citations from widely differing periods by scholars result in twisted presentations.
• The trigger/provocation for his essays is rarely discussed/probed.
• The practice of quoting a couple of lines at random purported as his opinion is horrifying.
• Absence of online access to archival treasures discourages voluntary initiative and strangulates scholarship.
• Writings on India and its past are at times misrepresented by motivated sections.
• Literalism and lack of perspective on the part of readers is a common drawback.
• Intellectual energy for delving into genealogy and general curiosity is missing.
• Critical interrogation is not yet the norm with the sacred label as a possible deterrent/complacence.
• Sly and slow attempts at democratizing Sri Aurobindo’s sayings with his contemporaries and putting them on par are on.
• Approaching him from one’s cultural and political standpoint is a debilitating reality.
• Perceiving his spirituality remains a problem and relying upon bookish explications for long leads to feigning.
• Prophecy and physics traced in Sri Aurobindo’s writings are prone to wild speculations.
• Disciples’ professed preference for one book/topic over another lends to likely warped reception.