Müller Meets Vivekananda over erasers

We all love stories of face-offs between great minds. Consider this set of statements which has been passed around as a sort of starter platter to the greatness of the Indian.

  

The issue with such posts is that they only serve to highlight the greatness of the Indian. It also gives a very narrow view of the interaction between two great minds, leave alone if they actually met or were contemporaries.

Let's break it down one by one.

Were they contemporaries?

Friedrich Max Müller (6 December 1823 – 28 October 1900)

Swami Vivekananda (12 January 1863 – 4 July 1902) 

Sure, they were. 

Did they meet? 

According to Wikipedia, that all-knowing source of all our information these days, they met over lunch on 28 May 1896. 

Did they talk about erasers? 

The internet is silent on their exact conversation on erasers, but Wikipedia does give a glimpse into what Vivekananda wrote about the meeting.

The visit was really a revelation to me. That little white house, its setting in a beautiful garden, the silver-haired sage, with a face calm and benign, and forehead smooth as a child's in spite of seventy winters, and every line in that face speaking of a deep-seated mine of spirituality somewhere behind; that noble wife, the helpmate of his life through his long and arduous task of exciting interest, overriding opposition and contempt, and at last creating a respect for the thoughts of the sages of ancient India—the trees, the flowers, the calmness, and the clear sky—all these sent me back in imagination to the glorious days of ancient India, the days of our brahmarshis and rajarshis, the days of the great vanaprasthas, the days of Arundhatis and Vasishthas. It was neither the philologist nor the scholar that I saw, but a soul that is every day realizing its oneness with the universe.

If you want to celebrate the Indian mind, this is a more compelling case, but one that can't be fitted into a handy meme.