Meeting and talking to him you would hear him say – 'I am basically a teacher. Wherever I am, my simple job is to teach.' Sometimes, even when you tried to reply his queries he would be saying at once – 'Don't explain to me; I am not your boss. I am not your master asking for an explanation. Just keep to yourself.' This was how such apparently opposite poles of approach wonderfully blended in one personality!
Here it is - mark his might. He was a freedom fighter, a thinker, a clear-cut major writer – Prof. Chittaranjan Das, popularly known as Chitta Bhai, a young man of 88. He always had the guts to speak face to face and say no even to someone who seemed most powerful to us. People, even the state cared to listen to what he had to say and write.
As diverse and complex as he was, creating a compact profile of him was no easy task either. Only if you have gone through his books, met and talked to him you could have a glimpse of it. However, he served as a professor in Agra University, as the founder teacher in Jeevan Vidyalaya, as a great promoter of Integral Education in Odisha and as a visiting professor in many foreign countries. He was an all-time multi-level, multi-subject and resourceful expert of wisdom and knowledge. Still he was always down to earth. A multilingual, an exemplary translator he still preferred to write in his typical style of the mother tongue.
He was never in frantic search of young people – they came to him all the time and were caught in his net. Rather he created young people and also made people young irrespective of their age and gender. Thus under his able leadership grew the group of Suhrud a very firm and flexible state-wide community of aspiring people to study, to work and experiment life together in the light of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother's vision.
Once you met him his prime concern would be to explore what you really were constantly provoking to evolve and become that. If in spite of the scope you didn't turn up he would mercilessly approach and attack you until you caught his point. But when he introduced you to someone he would be describing you like a VIP before the person. Such was his love for and unfaltering faith on your being and becoming!
He always led an uncompromising style of life with a divine discontent. His worldwide visits, relationships and extensive studies had only strengthened his ever-evolving world-view. Bhima Bhoi, Gopabandhu Das, Kabir, Sri Ramkrishna, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, Khalil Gibran, Spinoza, Martin Buber, Eric Fromm, Karl Marx... all of them found their place in him! But he needed no reference to introduce him. A friend, philosopher and guide, he was his own simulacrum!
Passing away on January 16, 2011 he only broke his physical limits to reach right into our hearts and grow.
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