A prime deliverer of an Indelible education

“He always dressed in Khaki shorts and a light blue shirt. That was his dress code. He told us it was simpler that way because he didn’t have to spend time choosing what to wear every day,” Tashi writes. “His classes were so much fun and we learnt about different topics like air pollution, evolution, the Bermuda triangle … endless topics.”

In a 1991 essay, another of his former students, Miriam wrote, “He taught a mixture of history, geography, science and natural history which he called ‘General Knowledge’. His class generally started with a complex diagram on the blackboard and concluded with a small group discussion about anything we happened to be interested in.”

Michael was born in London in 1931, of a Russian mother and a British father, and spent his early childhood in Riga, Latvia. In 1938, he and his brother were taken to England. During the war, he was a boarder at Dartington Hall, a progressive school.

Shanta, Michael’s future wife, had moved from Germany to Paris to improve her French, and this is where she and Michael met. Later the family moved to the Austrian Alps near the Swiss border where they built a small house. But the parents were reluctant to place Amra, their daughter, in the village school which only had one class. Having heard of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, they decided to visit the Ashram before confronting that problem. So they locked up their home, left the keys with a neighbour and set off as a family on an overland journey East, never to return. They arrived at the Ashram in December, 1965.

For many years, Michael ran the Auroville transport service, together with Rajan and a few boys from Morratandi and Edeyanchavadi whom they trained. Auro-garage was located on a plot (near JIPMER) that was in between Pondicherry and Auroville. The workshop maintained a variety of the vehicles that arrived with overland adventurers to Auroville. Since everything in those days, from people to goods, had to be transported from Pondicherry and within the community, Auro-garage was the lifeblood of the scattered activities taking place.

Michael was the hub that kept these and other vehicles running, including those of the Sisters of Cluny. He managed to do so by swapping parts between these vehicles and re-building them, being a trained mechanical engineer. However, his skills and interests were vast; he had been a rally driver, he dabbled in carpentry, machining and making musical instruments, and he spent a lot of time studying Viktor Schauberger’s theories on water and on building vortices in his tiny room.

He was also a cartoonist and had curiosity, enthusiasm and a good sense of humour (never taking himself very seriously). All these qualities made him an excellent teacher, one whose classes and personality are well remembered and still very much appreciated by his former students.

Tashi remembers, “He would tell us fantastic stories while we walked to the beach. He used to say that stories are floating in space and we just have to learn to catch them. After the school closed due to the big problem with Sri Aurobindo Society, Kathrin and I had bird watching classes with him. He used to take us on his bike. He loved the nature here and through him we learned a lot about the birds and small animals in our area. We also hunted down the open wells around Auroville: they were our swimming pools.

“Those were our ‘good old days’ with Michael. While I feel sad that he never came to Auroville later on in his life, we are always grateful to him for what he taught us and for all he inspired in us.”

“It was a revelation to see Tashi’s notebooks, the recognition of the lessons, exploding, intact, in this pocket of my memory,” says Renu. “Perhaps it was our age (11-13) that left the information seared so passionately into our beings, but his interest, enthusiasm and talent as a cartoonist made him and his lessons a favourite. He drew deftly on the large black-board, talking all the while, and we laboriously copied these elaborate drawings into our notebooks.

“The closing of the school in late 1976 was part of the enormous upheavals that would redefine our destinies and after that our lives drifted apart. Though a mere 12 kilometres separates Auroville from Pondicherry, an invisible chasm formed, engulfing many of our early teachers.

“In the year 2000 we organized a gathering of former Auroville students. One of the events involved us working together with our former Ashram teacher in the Matrimandir Gardens. The work consisted of moving earth by hand. I was shoveling the earth into a chetty when Michael Red-Beard mischievously muttered, “You know I am pretty sure we are moving back the same pile of earth we had moved here 30 years ago!”