To realise India's destinty to conquer and place her stamp on the whole world

 

(An excerpt from one of the three letters written by Sri Aurobindo while he was in Bengal in 1910. They were titled together as “Epistles from Abroad”. They were formatted as letters addressed to a fictional correspondent named "Biren". Originally intended for his weekly journal Karmayogin, they were published later and collected in Early Cultural Writings (Volume 1 of The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo). Sri Aurobindo spent part of his childhood and youth in England. The reference to Paris and river Siene are imaginary. Posting now as it is an example of true love for India even while one lives abroad.)

But in the sense you mean, I have brought India with me [to Paris], that which is eternal in India. Danton, when pressed to escape from the coming doom to Switzerland, answered, “One does not carry one’s country away with one on the sole of one’s shoes. ”That is the materialist’s answer, to whom the body is all. No, one cannot carry it on the shoe-soles, but one can carry it in one's heart and one can carry it in one’s soul. When I listen to the nightingale singing on English riverbank or garden-reaches or see the Seine flowing through the modern gaiety of Paris, I can hear again the manifold noise of the birds on an Indian morning and see rather Ganges flowing grandiose and leonine to her Eastern seas. The body is bound to its surroundings, but the heart exceeds them, and I carry the love of India with me even to the coldest climes. The soul is yet more free. It will be well when every Indian, instead of taking a waxlike stamp from his foreign surroundings, is able to carry India with him wherever he goes. For that will mean that India is destined to conquer and place her stamp upon the whole world.

- Sri Aurobindo

Text source: Early cultural writings, CWSA, Vol 01, Pg 550

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