The joy of working at the Matrimandir

John: We started work after Roger Anger left his body, on 15th January 2008. We were placed in the unique situation where there was no longer, physically, a captain steering the ship as there had been for all those previous years. All decisions were now squarely on our table. That took time for everyone to get used to.

Pierre: It’s far simpler when you have a leader who gives direction. At the beginning, during the building of the structure and the chamber, I was told that Piero was coming every morning with plans and instructions for everybody. Afterwards, for the completion of the outer skin of the Matrimandir, Roger in the same way gave precise design directives that we happily followed.

After his passing, we have been obliged to find another way of functioning, keeping in mind the spirit of the design. On a few issues it has been challenging to build consensus. Yet, we found a way to collaborate together and have been able to maintain a very fine working atmosphere.

Did Roger leave a sufficient number of instructions and details behind?

Pierre: The building was completed at that time; nothing was left, except the electronic device to automatically move the golden doors of the Matrimandir. The unfinished parts were the 12 gardens, the Garden of Unity, the oval road and the lake surrounding the oval.

For the Unity Garden, precise drawings were there, we executed them at the beginning of our mandate. I remember very well Roger saying during a special meeting in Town Hall that the gardens must be a collective work and never be associated with a particular name.

Elumalai: I had been working with Michael Tait before I became an executive. I saw Roger working on the garden designs, but he had great problems conceptualizing what he wanted. He himself was not a garden architect and he was looking for a person who could implement what he envisaged. But that did not manifest.

Pierre: Roger has himself made a model for the 12 gardens. Several teams have worked with him and made proposals for some of them, but nothing was finalized. Roger left precise guidelines for the gardens, which were followed by Marie, Marc and Maurizio. This allowed for the manifestation of the first three gardens. It went very smoothly, the atmosphere was very joyful. Afterward Meera and Marc made a proposition for the 9 remaining ones which was approved 2 years ago. We are working on their implementation.

What were the main works you have been involved with?

Elumalai: On the level of development, we built the Unity Garden including the pond, its fountain and its small amphitheater; the three gardens of Existence, Consciousness and Bliss; and we completed all the pathways in the oval. We also spent two years trying to find a location for our composting section for the gardens, which we have now started to develop. We have also planned and started the job of completing the two large rooms beneath the Amphitheater.

Another main activity, all along, has been taking care of the maintenance of the building and its surroundings. This included, for example, doing repairs such as re-doing the waterproofing of the petals.

Are the present works progressing as planned?

John: Some are moving smoothly, some are slower. A major work we are doing at present is building the Green Room beneath the Matrimandir amphitheater. We are changing the former underground air-conditioning room into a Green Room and opening direct access to the amphitheater. This work proceeds smoothly, along with its companion space on the other side of the amphitheater which is being developed as a gardening tools centre for the future.

Also, we are in the process of developing the design of the new Matrimandir Service Facility. For more than a year we have been working with architects Sonali and Ganesh, who have also designed the Green Room. A Marquette has been made for the Service Facility. The new building will be located at the end of the line of administrative buildings. This line now consists of the Town Hall, the Multimedia Centre, the Auroville Foundation Bhavan, SAIIER, the Archives (still under construction) and then there is space for one more building. As per Roger’s indication, next to that will be a support facility for Matrimandir. It will harbor all the activities that are now housed in various ramshackle buildings around the Matrimandir gardens oval – the administrative offices, the security, the laundry, the kitchen, a place for maintaining garden tools and machinery, the stock room and all the facilities needed by the one hundred or so people who work daily to maintain Matrimandir in all its aspects. The location has been approved by the Town Development Council. We hope this work can start soon.

But there are also areas where we haven’t been able to progress as we would have liked. For example, we couldn’t start building the new Matrimandir Reception Centre as Auroville doesn’t own the land where it is planned. Also, we have not been able to progress with the manifestation of the Gardens as quickly as we had hoped. Only now they are now picking up speed, as we move forward with the gardens of Progress, Utility and Wealth.

It has been said that you take all decisions with all the coordinators, so the executives are not really the ‘bosses’ of the Matrimandir.

Pierre: It is not like that. We are here to help the coordinators to do their work, but at the same time we have to take the final decisions in certain matters.

You need to work first in an ‘horizontal way’ to take in account all the concerns of the people working, specially the coordinators, and afterwards in a ‘vertical way’ to propose a solution that includes all the parameters expressed, which allows for a final consensus.

It’s a real challenge, but when it is well done, it functions very well. We try as much as we can to apply this process for all decisions, like recently for the increase of the wages.

Some people feel that there is a pretty relaxed atmosphere amongst the workers at the Matrimandir. Do you feel that there is an urgency to finish something? Did you push to get things done?

Srimoyi: There is very much an urgency and yes, we did push for the completion of the gardens as far as possible. I would have loved it if we had managed to manifest all the gardens by Auroville’s 50th anniversary on February 28th next year, but that seems like an unlikely dream. I would also have liked to have the lake in place, and the oval road. But all these are very complicated – everything is connected to everything else.

John: The oval road, for example – the road that separates the inner gardens from the Matrimandir Lake, is tied-in with some important aspects of the site, chiefly with a project to harvest all the runoff rainwater from 22-acre oval island – the oval with the Matrimandir, the amphitheater and the inner gardens. Experts differ on some aspects of how to go about this water harvesting. The harvesting technique has to be clear before we pave the road in case, for example, we have to place drainage pipes under the road.

Pierre: Several studies have been done, some of them proposed solutions that would be very costly to manifest. It appears that the existing water channels along the pathways could be a solution to our problems. We are waiting for a good and strong rain to verify this option.

Where are the executives in the development of the Matrimandir Lake?

Pierre: We are not directly involved; none of us have real qualifications for this task although we have participated in several meetings held by Michael Bonke on this topic.

We pushed actively for the realization of the mini test ponds, now many parameters have to be clarified and agreed by the TDC before going forward.

John: It is again an issue of following-up after Roger’s departure. Michael Bonke, who had worked closely with Roger about manifesting the Lake, is focused on materializing a large Lake as designed by Roger. He has formed a lake research group, which has built a few mini test ponds and done research in various sealing techniques. But the question of the size of the Lake is still undecided. Michael’s plan has been, from the beginning, to create a big test lake of 1/10th of the final lake size. This by itself would influence the final size and depth of the Lake. The Town Development Council will have to take up this topic and call meetings for the community to take the decision.

It’s interesting to see that the moods have swung around over the last ten years. Initially, the question was if we should have a lake or not. That question seems to have settled to a ‘yes’, and has been replaced now by ‘how big is the lake?’

What is the progress with the four entrances to the Matrimandir? They all have double doors: the ‘spaceship’ outer door that slides underneath the Matrimandir following its curve, and the double glass doors inside. Why has so little manifested over the years?

Pierre: The first ‘spaceship door’, as you call it, is installed and functions every day now. Still a few improvements have to be done to fine-tune its functioning. Regarding the glass doors, one has been installed but it has been only recently that we could get a consensus to do the remaining three. Some items, like quite sophisticated hinges, are difficult to buy locally; we are on the way to get them.

John: We have the push going to have the glass doors in all the four entrances installed before next February, and also have all four ‘spaceship’ doors activated – though that seems to be more of a challenge as the motors and electronics have to be adjusted to the new technology that has come in. The door we have installed is now 20 years old and in the meantime more modern ways to do it have evolved. We are waiting for a French expert to help us with the upgrade.

Given the volume of visitors, how do you see these doors being used? On a normal day, three of the four entrances are closed.

Srimoyi: Why Roger wanted four entrances is probably a question of significance and design – and time will tell how we are going to use them. At present we use three of the four entrances – east, north and west. But as the people have to pick-up their shoes on the way out, we use only one entrance at a time, otherwise people would get completely confused.

In the morning we started using the east entrance so that people enter the Matrimandir when the sunlight strikes it, but found it was too hot for the people on duty. For this reason, we have changed the morning entrance to the west and the evening entrance to the east. It is a building for the future; we’ll see in the future how the doors need to be used.

What are the plans for the 12 meditation chambers in the Matrimandir petals? At some point in time you were experimenting with LED lights on white painted walls to get the colour for the chambers, instead of colour-painted walls.

Pierre: We have done two rooms with LED lighting, the rooms Mother called ‘Goodness’ and ‘Generosity’. Some people like it very much, as they feel ‘entering into the light’, but others prefer the painted rooms. Another problem is that you are not able to have such a deep colour with LED, as the light spectrum is too bright for some of the rooms. It has also been difficult to get an even diffusion of the light. Due to the fact that we have to hide the light under the platform, the upper part of the room is quite pale. We are working on these issues. Many painted rooms have to be redone; now we have to choose between these two options.

Access is one of the main challenges and in this area you have done remarkable work by being able to maintain the atmosphere.

Srimoyi: I would call it the major challenge, for we are under pressure to allow ever more people in.

Over the years, and very gradually, we – a big group of us – have made many changes which we believed were necessary. We worked for months on a visitors’ policy; it went to the community and the Governing Board, we included feedback, and it was finally passed.

We are extremely concerned that we keep the atmosphere as pure as possible, that those who visit the Chamber experience what Mother has put there. A special problem is how to receive Special Guests (VIPs); they often need special attention. The Secretary and Working Committee are under pressure from all kinds of Special Guests to give them preferential treatment. We are happy that we have been able to agree on a working protocol and that we have managed to find a good working solution for the Special Guest reception.

Have you reached a limit in the number of people you can receive?

Srimoyi: The pressure comes up during certain seasons, such as Christmas and New Year, when there are huge numbers of people visiting the Matrimandir. We have made extra visiting batches to cope with the pressure. But we have to see how the future develops. As per our experience, how to proceed will be shown to us.

We have meanwhile started building up a database of all names and addresses of visitors who have come for concentration, so that we can recognize them for subsequent visits. We also started a booking link on Auronet for Aurovilians who want to bring their personal visitors in the morning hour reserved for that.

Do you have any financial pressures?

John: The money comes in as and when needed, the same miraculous inflow of funds that has sustained Matrimandir for decades. It remains to be seen what would happen if we start a larger project, such as the Service Facility, estimated at Rs 6 crores, or the Oval Road (Rs 2 crores) or the Matrimandir Lake. When we were completing the Matrimandir building, in the years 2006-2008, we were a bit in minus, but today we are fine. Our fundraising efforts consist of keeping up the correspondence with donors, meeting them and sending out the Matrimandir Newsletter to our friends and regular donors. But also, when we have a special requirement we do make a special appeal.

Srimoyi: The offering boxes also help – even though we have placed them in unobtrusive places, such as along the sidewalk.

Have you been supported by the community or did you feel there was a separation?

John: There are different levels to that. There are probably 200 Aurovilians working here during the month, and on a daily basis 50 to 60. The larger group takes care of the ‘presence’ in the Chamber, in the petals, and does the evening and night watches. Some hang on rock-climbing ropes to clean the discs on the outside of the Matrimandir. That’s a large crowd and at that level, there is a huge and enthusiastic support. People are really giving their service to Matrimandir.

For the garden development, to complete the twelve gardens, we would like a big flow of creative energy coming in. Even though we have a design concept that has been approved by the community two years ago, we do not have the sense of community enthusiasm and support for it. That, personally, I miss.

Looking back at eight years of being Matrimandir’s executive, what was your main experience?

Elumalai: I experienced joy, and I believe that was there because I felt guided.

Pierre: I am very grateful to have had this experience of responsibility, it helped me to grow. Being an executive has been very challenging at times. You have to focus on any problem right at the beginning if you want to avoid more serious ones. In a way, this permanent attention is the guide. But in many situations, I experienced a very clear ‘guidance’.

Srimoyi: The guidance has been given to us all along. Personally, I am grateful for the opportunity it gave me to learn and move forward. I hope I have been useful.

John: Gratitude definitely, to be here, at the center of Auroville.