A full and fulfilling life

Francis was born in Brooklyn and spent his formative years on the west side of Manhattan, before moving out to Long Island. “I didn’t get much education, mainly because of my attitude: I was the kind of kid who no teacher would want in their class. In school, I had the feeling I was always in a cage.

“I came out of high school totally ignorant, and pretty untamable. When I was 17, I joined the Navy; nothing noble, I just needed a place to sleep! Because I lacked a certain discipline, I had some problems with authority. The fact I got through those three years with minimum damage was an achievement.”

In 1968 he travelled with a friend from east Asia to India. They landed in Calcutta, then took a train to Madras.

“We were there for three or four days and I got so tired of rice and dal. Then I learned there was good French cuisine at Pondicherry. I got on one of those red and yellow buses. The fare was only three rupees, so I thought it couldn’t be far. It took 6½ hours!”

He stayed at the Hotel de l’Europe where he had a “half-way decent meal”. But after a few days he had to leave because the room was booked. The manager said he should go to the Ashram to see if he could stay in an Ashram guest house. Francis’s first encounter with the Ashram was not exactly smooth.

“The first guy I saw in the Ashram was Madhav Pandit and he took one look at me...well, I was a bit ragged and we ended up having words. He was basically saying ‘Out, out’. Then Amrita ran in because of the noise. Madhav explained I wanted to stay in the Ashram but I had no money. But I had a stack of money because we had just sold our cameras, so like my usual charming self I pulled out a wad of rupees and waved it in front of them.”

They sent him to Reg’s guesthouse. “He took one look at me and said ‘out, out, out’”. Then they sent him to Parc a Chabon (today’s Park Guest House), where he took a large family room. Francis and his friend always travelled with games, so they turned this room into a popular game centre.

“We had been on the road, so Pondicherry was basically rest and relaxation. There were Europeans around, it was a clean, sleepy town and I was curious about the Samadhi, about all these white figures and incense. I was sure Federico Fellini was around.”

Meeting Mother

One day, Maggi Litchi, one of Mother’s secretaries, invited him for tea and during the conversation asked him about the date of his birthday. He told her it had been two days before. She said he had to see Mother and she would arrange it.

“I went to see The Mother with an attitude similar to the one in which I went to see the Egyptian pyramids and the Taj Mahal: just one more experience. Maggi took me up a narrow staircase. It was all cheap plywood, and we passed these tiger skins which looked as if they needed to be refreshed.

“I walked into Mother’s room and they told me to kneel. I remember I knelt down but I was a little uneasy and wanted to get up again. But then I looked up and she was smiling at me.

“The last thing I remember was hearing the screen door close. And then I got sucked up into those eyes.... The next thing I knew I was standing outside the Ashram post office with this gigantic bouquet of red roses and a stupid little grin on my face. And everybody’s walking by me, giggling, ‘We know where you’ve been!’

“I didn’t know what had happened but I knew it was something significant. Before that, one of the main objects in my life was to get high and The Mother got me very high! I wanted to stay in the Ashram to be close to that energy, so I kept coming up with reasons why I had to see her again, and kept writing letters. Finally, I got a message from her, conveyed through Maggi, saying too much contact with her was not good because I was living off her energy and not creating my own. The spark had been lit and now it was up to me to create the bonfire.”

Early Auroville

One day, Jean Maslow asked Francis to help him build a house in Auroville. “I said, ‘What’s Auroville?’ He said ‘It’s the city of the future’. Next morning at some ridiculous hour I got into a Land Rover and we went through nothing, and nothing continued, and finally he said, ‘We’re here’. I looked around. Nothing. I said, ‘You’re kidding!’”

But Francis enjoyed the physical work. One evening he missed the return journey and Arindam, another early settler, invited him to sleep on his kitchen floor. Sometime later, Arindam announced he was going to America and told Francis he could take over his place.

“Next morning there was somebody outside banging on a 55 gallon drum and demanding water. There was a drought because the monsoon had failed the season before, so I basically spent all my days filling up barrels on bullock carts from the local village because Arindam’s well was the only bore well in the whole area.”

Around May, the friend who had accompanied him to India came to visit and invited him up to Nepal for the summer. “I went. It was one big party but I was missing something. Towards the end of the summer, I decided to go back to Pondicherry. I remember walking into the Ashram dining room, weary from travel, but I was insanely happy to be back.”

Francis returned to his watering duties in Auroville. One day Bob Lawlor, the first settler in Auroville, came by asking for help in building a dam. Francis volunteered and moved to the community of Forecomers.

“We were up before dawn, wearing just a loincloth and tundu, and we carried earth and bricks twelve hours a day in the tropical sun. We lived on kor and eucalyptus tea and in my whole life I’ve never been in better shape.

“We were all crazy. At one point, Bob decided that everything had to be painted. So we had a blue kitchen, a white meditation room, a yellow theatre, and one day I got an ex-race horse and built a barn, which I wanted to paint red but it came out pink. There was a door with many stripes, and when people would ask for the toilet, we would show them the door. When they opened it, all they saw was a toilet in the ground and the distant horizon.

“Everybody had so much fun it was unbelievable. We put on two performances which people from the Ashram came out to watch. In one, everybody walked through the canyon and people would pop out from behind rocks or out of a barrel and read some poem about a cat.

“All this was happening in the middle of nowhere. It was like a moonscape, and on full moon nights with these canyons around it was just exquisite. There was a magic in the air, we were all so influenced by Her energy: it was definitely Her energy that kept it all happening. In spite of sunburn, worms, and jaundice, we were all smiling because we were so happy.”

Mother leaves

But in November, 1973, Mother left her body.

“I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t accept the fact she had left her body. I felt abandoned, devastated. My street kid background had made me skeptical by nature but everybody was talking about Mother transforming the cells and I really thought it would happen. In our beautiful ignorance and arrogance we anticipated that within 20 years Auroville would be built and we would all be supramentalised!”

Some people left Auroville, but Shyamsundar, who Mother had appointed as the Auroville liaison, asked Francis to assist a visiting American who wanted to write a project to get funds for Auroville.

“This project was gigantic; it was for building schools, hospitals, forests, dams. Getting caught up in this kept me in Auroville.”

Francis went around gathering information from the settlers. One day he wandered over to the Matrimandir construction site. “Somebody said, ‘Hand me a clamp’ and I said, ‘What’s a clamp?’ That was the beginning. There was such an electric current in this place, I was hooked. I would get up early and go to work there seven days a week, mornings and afternoons. We were high as kites on the energy; it was such a beautiful experience.”

The dream was to be disrupted, however, by an increasingly bitter conflict with the Sri Aurobindo Society. “I’m an apolitical guy but I totally got pulled in. I was in the centre of it all, chairing meetings. I get frightened just to say it now, but at the time we thought we were Mother’s warriors, fighting for ‘truth’.”

“Actually, it was Navajata, the Chairman of the Sri Aurobindo Society (SAS), who made me a hero in the cause by getting me and Savitra deported from India.”

Within three months Francis and Savitra were back. Later, however, Francis left Auroville of his own volition.

America

“In 1979 I was tired. I remember coming home after an all-night concreting and knocking over a kerosene lamp and kerosene going all over my bed and I thought, this can’t go on. I was broke so I decided I had to go to make some money.”

This took much longer than he had anticipated. “Mother gave me the one thing I could least afford if I wanted to make money in America – a conscience.”

For eight years Francis took various jobs, travelling all over America with Lila, his partner at the time. “I was looking for a place where I felt I belonged, and never finding it.” One day Lila said she wanted to go somewhere. “I said, great. Where? She said, ‘Auroville’. Part of me didn’t want to go back so I said we had to sell the house first, which I thought would be very difficult, but everything fell into place.

“At three o’clock one morning we returned. We pulled in outside Joan Tomb’s house. The moment I stepped out of that car I knew I wasn’t going anywhere else. The feeling I had been searching for during eight years in America was right here.”

But Auroville had changed. “What I found most troubling was the disharmony at the Matrimandir. I was looking forward so much to get back to that vibration but now there were two groups in conflict. I tried to go back to work there but couldn’t: it was like an extension of the SAS conflict.”

Instead he became involved with the ‘Newsreal’ video project. “We had a great time producing this weekly news update. In those days everybody was in their isolated little area, there was no Internet, so this was a great way to inform people about what was happening in the community.”

The bakery story

Then Francis was asked to find out what was happening at the new Auroville bakery in Kuilapalayam which the bakers, Otto and Jean-Denis, had built but left before baking could begin.

“I walked into the bakery. Everything was in place but all these people were sitting around because nobody knew how to operate the ovens.”

Francis heard that the Ashram bakery used the same kind of ovens, so for several weeks he drove to Pondicherry every morning at 3.30 am to observe how the Ashramites baked bread. “It was amazing how many people were involved. People would come in, clean one or two pots and then leave. Finally, everything would be ready for baking. Then this old man would descend the stairs on the arm of an Israeli woman. He opened the oven and then another guy handed the old man a piece of Ashram handmade paper. He crumpled it up and the lady threw it in the oven. The old man watched, and he could tell by how fast it combusted whether the heat in the oven was right or not. If everything was OK, he would nod, go back upstairs, and the baking would begin. Nobody seemed to have thought of a thermometer...”

The Auroville bakery began functioning, but that was not the end of the problems. “During the season the villagers would bring their compost to the field next door, and from the compost came trillions of flies. We were covered in them and we had to cover everything. I decided to put screens on the windows, but this cut down the ventilation and the workers started passing out because of the heat. So then we fitted extractor fans, but then the current never worked. Finally, I had to get a generator, build a generator house, and we had this incredibly complicated electrical system to allow us to switch from the mains grid to the generator. All to get rid of the flies!”

Francis spent 4 ½ years at the bakery. “It was a success. We all got along in the team because there was no doubt I was in charge. I’m a terrible employee but I have a good sense of coordination logistics, and although I can be very pushy, I know when to back off.”

Newcomers housing, land

Francis’s organizational skills were clearly much needed in Auroville. When Jean Pougault had an idea to create Newcomer housing, Francis decided to take it on. “It was a pyramid scheme. that time you could build a liveable structure for one to one and ½ lakhs. The Newcomer would pay this money, and we would repay 80% if they left after one year and 70% after two years. The balance would allow us to construct new ones. I went to America and explained the concept to the Foundation for World Education people and they provided a few lakhs of rupees to get it going.”

It worked well, and over the ten years he was involved they created 24 Newcomer houses. But then Auroville stopped taking Newcomers for some time and the Housing Service allocated a number of Newcomer housing units to Aurovilians. “It broke the chain, so the project collapsed.”

Francis became involved in construction with Rolf and Brigitte, doing accounts and administration. Then he was asked to take up land purchase. “I did it between 1995 and 2000. Guy ran the fundraising aspect and we raised a lot of money. We bought more land in those five years than Auroville had done in the previous twenty. However, a new Secretary said we were paying too much and froze the whole process. He threw the switch on all the hard work that had gone into building up momentum and credibility around the world.”

Youth and the state of Auroville today

In recent years, Francis has been involved in making videos about Auroville. It began when Doris, his partner, said she wanted to make a documentary on the building of the Matrimandir. As she was a Newcomer at the time, she asked him to open doors to allow her to talk to the right people.

“That’s how the latest video thing began. It was all about documenting our history, trying to capture a time period.”

Two of the documentaries were about the experience of the first children born here. It’s a generation about which Francis has strong views.

“Their parents were driven to create Mother’s dream but all they seem driven today to create is their own dreams. We have got some very bright people here. They are taking care of themselves and their families very well but they are not participating in the Auroville project.”

Does this mean he is pessimistic about Auroville’s future?

“I feel the direction of Auroville has been hijacked by the Aurovilians. At one point we all came here for the same reason but it’s not so today, and the Dream is some fantasy off on a pedestal somewhere. The goal now is to build a city not human unity, whereas we understood that building the city was just to keep us busy while we worked on the unity. Anyway, we failed; we are more divided than ever before.

“Something has to change to just take us to the next step. And I’m not talking about achieving the supramental. We have to get out of pre-crèche and into kindergarten. I’m sure there are people here who are growing as individuals, but collectively we are hopeless.”

Francis has vast experience in different domains of work in the community. If somebody asked him to join one of the working groups today, would he agree?

“It happened, and I refused. I wouldn’t want to engage at the level at which the game is being played. Also, the work has become so much more complicated, you have to be much more knowledgeable and you need an energy that I no longer have.”

And yet... in his Auronet tag Francis describes himself as “Healthy and Happy with small cynical attacks”. So which is the real Francis?

“It’s about having faith. If I look at Auroville with the mind, it’s depressing. I see a New Age retreat that is totally dependent upon tourism, and the government. But the fact that Auroville still exists after all the rubbish that we have poured upon it is a miracle. So how can I not have faith that Mother is who she says she is? But does doubt, cynicism, enter me periodically? Yes, I would like to expunge it but it is still present.”

Francis has now stepped back from almost all his activities, including video production. Does this mean he favours a more contemplative perspective these days?

“It has to do with trying to increase my receptivity to that special energy, to experience exquisite moments and to extend those moments more and more while trying to keep the personality out of the way to allow the opening to grow.”

He concludes, “I can’t imagine anything as fulfilling as what I’ve experienced in the last 50 years and I’m utterly grateful for this. I didn’t become supramentalised, but did I have a very beautiful experience? Yes, I did. Do I have any regrets? No, I don’t.”