Nirodbaran
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Nirodbaran (November 17, 1903 – July 17, 2006, Pondicherry) or "Nirod" for short, was the literary secretary and personal physician to Sri Aurobindo and scribe for Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol and senior member of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. He graduated from Edinburgh University with a degree in medicine. He was told about Sri Aurobindo and The Mother by Dilip Kumar Roy while in Paris. In 1930 he visited the Ashram and met the Mother, and was overwhelmed as he had a spiritual experience. After some vacillation he finally felt the call and joined Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1933, leaving behind the prospect of a highly lucrative career. In the Ashram he entered upon a new life and had many experiences and realizations.He returned to the Ashram with the intention of practising Yoga, and took up work as the resident doctor. He found to his surprise that poetry was one of the vocations taken up by some of the disciples. As Sri Aurobindo had already withdrawn from the public life of the ashram, he communicated with and instructed the sadhaks via letters, and Nirodbaran entered into a voluminous correspondence with Sri Aurobindo described as 'epistolary history', alone runs into 1,200 pages who encouraged and guided his attempts at poetry. He published a collection of his poems as Blossom of the Sun and 50 poems by Nirodbaran, which were revised and commented on by Sri Aurobindo.
In November 1938 Sri Aurobindo broke his leg and as a physician Nirodbaran was one of the disciples with medical knowledge who attend him while he recuperated. Nirodbaran was born into an aristocratic and distinguished Zamindar family. Nirodbaran was Paternal Uncle of Late Major(Dr) Sukumar Talukdar. Among Nirodbaran other close relatives were Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Chittaranjan Das, General Jayanto Nath Chaudhuri and Air Chief Marshal Subroto Mukherjee. Later he had published Talks with Sri Aurobindo (3 volumes), Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo (2 volumes), and his memoir 12 years with Sri Aurobindo, as well as various volumes of poetry and other writings.
Nirodbaran left his body on the evening of 17 July 2006 at the Ashram Nursing Home in Pondicherry. He went peacefully. He was 102. He was buried at the Ashram's Cazanove Gardens at around 4 in the evening of the next day.