Reading the runes

A friend of mine would regularly examine the annual 21st February bonfire to see if the coming year would be a good or a bad one for the Auroville community. ‘Reading the runes’, he jokingly called it. Quite what he was reading he never disclosed. Was it the something of the smoke, the shape of the flame or the patterns in the ashes? Whichever method he used, his prognostications always tended to be positive, if not always accurate.

Reading the runes is a chancy business – at times, the augurs of ancient Rome delivered deeply ambiguous messages to keep their reputation for correctly reading the signs intact – but a fascinating pastime.

So this 15th August, can we discern any straws in the wind, hints of future developments in Auroville? One possibility that I see is an accelerated movement towards greater integration and unification in certain areas. The signs? Well, it is interesting that the people involved in raising money for the land have continually expanded their focus to include and integrate more and more of the Auroville area. Their first appeal, some years ago, was narrowly focussed on acquiring land around Matrimandir, later this expanded to include the city area, and now they have decided to open up a new fund-raising front to acquire Greenbelt land.

The opening of Santé, the new multi-purpose health centre, is another example of wider inclusion and integration, in this case of some of the health specialists who, until now, have been working in relative isolation from each other. Then there is the stated aim of the new Youth Link group to “bridge the gap between the generations through cultural and educational events”, something which they successfully began to put into practice in their recent International Youth Day event at Bharat Nivas.

Finally, I was deeply touched to read, on Auronet, an announcement giving a combined overview of August events in both Auroville and the Ashram. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem much, but those who know something of the past history will understand that such a low-key announcement matter-of-factly linking the two institutions is actually pregnant with significance. Interestingly, the initiative came from a group called ‘Sourcing Our Oneness’.

My other straw in the wind concerns new signposts. The history of signposts in Auroville is a fascinating one. In the early years, there was a strong resistance among the settlers to signposting roads or the names of communities. Perhaps it was a kind of horror of the wrong people turning up at one’s door. The inevitable result was that uninformed visitors could be seen wandering for days in the early Greenbelt, like souls lost in limbo.

There were some half-hearted attempts to remedy the situation, a few hand-carved community signs were made, but their shelf-life tended to be short. A rather fine one in Samriddhi disappeared overnight, presumably because the scrap value of the pipe supporting the sign was perceived by someone to be of greater interest than the information the sign was imparting.

However, some years ago, a former Secretary decided to take the matter in hand and erected a slew of new signposts indicating the names and directions of some of the main Auroville institutions and communities. It was not a universally popular move. The signposts were dubbed ‘institutional’, the ‘kind of thing you would find on motorways in the West’ and ‘not at all in the spirit of Auroville’. While nobody dared take them down, one was covered up one night by a huge butterfly art piece and other, alternative community signposts began to spring up, carved on rocks or artistically etched into wood.

However, in the past month or so a new type of road sign has started appearing along our roads. A combined effort of Nathalie and the students of Udavi School, Marie from Botanical Gardens, Monica with her design studio, as well as the Auroville Road Service, the signs communicate necessary road safety instructions or warnings in a fun, playful way. So a warning to slow down because you are approaching a traffic jam area is accompanied by an illustration of black ants streaming towards a pot of jam; ‘Slow, wildlife friendly road’ is illustrated by an image of snakes swallowing cars; a puncture area is indicated by a porcupine with quills flying off its back; and, my favourite, placed strategically close to Poppo’s megalithic excavations, warns ‘Slow, dinosaurs on the run’.

The signs were generally enthusiastically received – ‘It is the first time I feel we got the road signs right, they carry the spirit of Auroville’ wrote one Aurovilian, ‘A refreshing way to approach serious traffic problems’, wrote another – although, this being Auroville, dissenting voices soon surfaced on Auronet. Who gave permission for these signs to be erected, one Aurovilian sternly asked? Are we so hopeless we need to find entertainment in traffic-signs, wailed a proto-Puritan: ‘Road signs are meant for safety, not amusement’.

In fact, what these unhappy voices were detecting and, perhaps, fearing, was that signs can signify much more than the actual message displayed on them. Perhaps the deeper message behind these signs (apart, once again, from the fact that they represent a successful collaboration) is that at last we are learning to be a little more playful, lighter, with each other, through daring to use humour rather than the traditional imperative case to try to modify people’s behaviour.

It would not be before time.