The present book Recollections and Reflections contains a record of the author's experiences from his earliest years. They are presented here not in a chronological order, but as each incident or impression has come to his recollection. The aim has been to delineate the features in the perspective of universal feelings and sentiments. A great deal of emotion has entered into the texture of the narratives, for it cannot be discarded when one deals with the memories of the past which shape a man's very soul and being.

During a visit to Nowgong, my birth-place, so late as 1958, I was moved to tears having missed my grandmothers, father, uncles and aunts, who nourished me in childhood, and whose voice still echoes through the rooms and precincts of our ancestral home in Fauzdari Patti.

The first chapter entitled Never to Return depicts the sur- roundings in which the author was born and brought up. It gives an account of his parents and other near relatives and neighbours who have contributed to his intellectual and spiritual make-up. Having lost his mother when he was only eighteen months old the author devotes several paragraphs to delineate the pathetic loneliness of a motherless child, eternally saddened by the feeling "If my mother had been alive."

The second chapter Glimpse of Parnassus describes the author's attainment of ease and confidence in handling the medium of verse writing, and his regrettable abandonment of the practice just when he was on the point of achieving perfection in the art. This was owing to the demands of his profession as a teacher of English literature where he had to study and expound English authors critically, and his examination of the source materials of Assam History, and his engrossment in the work of bringing the new Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies in Assam to the position of a full-fedged research organisation. Thus, all charms flew at the touch of cold philosophy, and the poet had to retire from the slopes of Mount Parnassus without having an opportunity to taste the Castalian spring.

The third chapter Quintessence of Experience records the author's philosophy of life. Every truth that dawned on him was reduced to an aphorism. The collection of aphorisms is supple- mented by a description of the author's view of life where he shows the way in which he has tried to eliminate the Seven Hindrances which serve as obstacles in the progress of work, because these hindrances lead to a temporary distemper which enfeebles or energy and diminishes our inclination for uninterrupted endeavour.

**Contents and Sample Pages**