On the way

This month is the 35th anniversary of Auroville Today’s first issue, which coincided with the passing of the Auroville Foundation Act. 

The surface history of Auroville Today is quickly told. It began as a response to a request from the Auroville International centres for regular factual information about Auroville, something that was lacking at that time. Quite soon, however, Auroville Today was being read by more and more Aurovilians, eager to find out what was happening in their own community! Over time, a third readership emerged when we started sending issues to embassies and diplomatic legations of Auroville’s non-Indian residents, as well as important Government of India offices, so they could better understand a place which doesn’t fit into any existing pigeonholes.  

Important landmarks along the way included a radical change in format fairly soon after our launch, the decision to print in colour which began with  the completion of the Matrimandir in 2008, and the launch of a digital issue a few years back. 

And now another major landmark beckons: the launch of our website. 

But there is another Auroville Today story which is more to do with process, and that is one in which a few individuals, with no previous training or experience, took up a task without any idea of what it would involve or where it would lead. Along the way, new people bringing new perspectives joined the team, and previously unconsidered possibilities opened up which led to new ways of looking and understanding not only Auroville but also what Auroville Today could be about, which, we discovered, could be something much more than providing a reflecting mirror. 

And so we began not only to document events or profile individuals and initiatives, but also to probe beneath the surface, to start asking questions about how we in Auroville are doing things, and why we are here, as well as trying to identify the trends and the deeper currents; and this, in turn, acted as a catalyst, initiating or deepening discussions within the community on important topics. And so Auroville Today became part of the ongoing conversation rather than simply reporting upon it. 

Yet something else of what we expressed in that first editorial (how brash we were then!) still holds true.  And that is that our prime intention is not to ‘push’ a particular point of view, but to communicate what is happening in Auroville today in all its rich complexity – the individual stories, dreams, initiatives, as well as the culture, economy, environment, architecture etc. of this place, not excluding the numerous warts – as a means of allowing our readers to experience something of this extraordinary, ever unfolding, experiment. 

And so our work, both as individuals and as members of the Auroville Today team, is never done. We are always, like Auroville, ‘on the way’.