Bhagavan [Ramana Maharshi] said, “He is a pandit in the Raja’s College at Vizianagaram. Nobody would take him for such a great poet. He looks a very ordinary man. He wants to become an ___ (one who can compose extempore poems on any given subject). But all this is only activity of the mind. The more you exercise the mind and the more success you have in composing verses or doing satavadanam (giving attention to many things at a time) the less peace you have. What use is it to acquire such accomplishments if you don’t acquire peace? But if you tell such people this, it does not appeal to them. They can’t keep quiet. They must be composing songs. As Nayana used to say: ‘In going forward one can run any distance at any speed, but when it is a question of going backward, that is turning inwards, even one step is hard to take.’
“Somehow it never occurs to me to write any book or compose poems. All the songs I have made were made at the request of someone or other in connection with some particular event. Even the Reality in Forty Verses, of which so many commentaries and translations now exist, was not planned as a book but consists of verses composed at different times and afterwards arranged as a book by Muruganar and others. The only poems that came to me spontaneously and compelled me, as it were, to compose them, without anyone urging me to do so, are the Eight Verses to Arunachala and the Eleven Verses to Arunachala. The first day the opening words of the Eleven Verses suddenly came to me one morning, and even if I tried to suppress them, saying, ‘What have I to do with these words?’ they would not be suppressed till I composed a song beginning with them, and all the words flowed easily without any effort. In the same way the second stanza was made the next day and the succeeding ones the following days, one each day. Only the tenth and eleventh were composed the same day. The next day I started out to go round the hill. Palaniswami was walking behind me, and after we had gone some way, Ayyaswami seems to have called him back and given him a pencil and paper saying, ‘For some days now Swami has been composing poems every day. He may do so today as well, so you had better take this paper and pencil with you.’ I learnt about this only when I noticed that Palani was not with me for a while but came and joined me later. That day, before I returned to Skandasramam, I wrote six of the eight stanzas in the Ashtakam. Either that evening or the next day Narayana Reddi came. He was at that time living in Vellore as an agent of Singer & Co. and he used to come from time to time. Ayyaswami and Palni told him about the poems and he said, ‘Give them to me at once and I will go and print them.’ He had already published some books about me. When he insisted on taking the poems, I told him he could do so and could publish the first eleven as ___ (padikam) and the rest, which were in a different metre, as ___ (ashtakam). To make up the ___ I at once
composed two more stanzas and he took all the 19 stanzas with him to get them published.” In this connection I told Bhagavan, “I hear Narayana Reddi is now at Tindivanam and that he stays confined in one room.” Bhagavan said, “That is all right. The mind must have peace; that is all that matters.” (9-5-46, Day by Day with Bhagavan)
