Will you please write your autobiography? ' his fans have asked him imploringly time and again. But his answer is simple: he believes that there were far more worthy and eventful lives than his and he would not like to burden the catalogue with his!
Worthy is a relative term. But we agree that there are innumerable lives more eventful than his. The question is how many were capable of reading the significance in the events as he does? He however remains unrelenting.
But here is the man whom Providence brought up through a paradox of experiences in his childhood - sending him into an affluent family with ideal parents and in the most charming milieu imaginable - and at the same time exposing him to the unexpected in life when his house was plundered twice before his eyes; also giving him the experience of witnessing the horrors of an unprecedented famine around him.
Here is a man who in his youth was a fascinating revolutionary leader courting jail and escaping an assassination attempt in a faraway resort in Indonesia.
Here is the author who never knew that writing was an activity that was special. For him it was as natural as speaking or humming a tune.
Here is a man whose earliest quest was to find trace the cause of human suffering - a quest that led him to Marxism and finally revealed to him the profundity that was Sri Aurobindo's vision of human destiny.
Here is India's foremost bilingual writer whose use of the two languages he writes in is uniquely original.
Here is probably the best loved author in Oriya and a significant writer in English - whose writings one can never forget - for their impact becomes a natural ingredient of light and solace one seeks in life.