Ambassador Siddhartha Shankar Ray³⁵

America’s largest audience for my Peace Concert was perhaps 10,000, and that was because of a Bengali. The Indian Ambassador to America at that time was a Bengali, Siddhartha Shankar Ray. The Ambassador invited so many people.

Ambassador Ray once said to me, “We are all politicians. We go up and then we go down. In a few years, our career is over. But you are our India’s cultural Ambassador, so you will last forever.” The day I got the Mahatma Gandhi Award with Coretta Scott King,⁴⁰ he told me that I was the cultural Ambassador from India. He was very, very kind, very kind.

Four of Ambassador Ray’s aunts lived in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. They begged and begged him to come, but he did not want to go to Pondicherry. They begged him even when he was Chief Minister and when he was holding other high posts, but he did not come. All the aunts were very familiar to me. One of them was one of my Ashram “mothers,” Sahana.

To my great surprise, Ambassador Ray lavished so much kindness and affection on me.