“Auroville has given me opportunities to discover myself”

I come from a small village in Vellore district of Tamil Nadu, about 200 kilometres away from Auroville. Our family has a farming background. I grew up in a very beautiful place with vast agricultural fields surrounded by rolling hills and in a very free environment. I was curious as a child and took every opportunity to explore the beauty that nature has offered. My parents let me grow up like that. And our village had a sense of community, where everybody knew and cared for each other.

Within a few years, the beautiful rural landscape of my childhood started changing dramatically. Vellore’s river had dried up, there was a lot of water scarcity, and new industrial establishments, even polluting ones, came up. A lot of people sold their agricultural land to developers, and the road close to our house became a State Highway with many commercial enterprises springing up along it.

I remember when I was in 10th grade, when we were losing all the hangout spots we had enjoyed as children that I first learned about NGOs, and how they work to protect the environment and improve the social life of people. So I thought if I could start an NGO I could plant trees and do social work to stop the destruction which was happening around me. When I shared this with my father, he didn’t take it seriously, but I think this was the seed of my interest in helping people and the environment.

I enjoyed studying but the only options for higher education known in that area were engineering or medicine, as well as commerce for the students who did not do well in science subjects.

All my cousins chose engineering because medicine was too costly. But I instinctively felt engineering was not my thing because I always had this free spirit which I felt engineering would not allow to blossom. I also knew that education was important for me to take any steps to bring a change. One day, as I was exploring in the internet centre what to study next, I found architecture, which I felt could help me change how the place where I grew up was being developed. The creative and multidisciplinary nature of the study interested me. But it was a five year course, it was expensive, and I would have to study it in Chennai.

My extended family said to my father, ‘Why do you want to put all this effort and money into a girl who you’re going to send off to another family when she gets married while living was getting difficult for us with the increasing stress on the farmers?” But because I was determined to pursue this, he supported me. I got into a good architecture school in Chennai. It was the first time I had lived away from home and in a city. Only seven of us students came from villages, the rest were from the city, and my English was not very good in those days. But everything fell in place because the subject was so interesting, it allowed me to express myself and learn new things.

It allowed me to travel a lot and learn from different people and places all over India about architecture: that really opened up a lot for me. Towards the end of my study, I had to do one year of internships. One of these I did in Chennai with the Public Works Department, which was not a very inspiring experience for what I sought to learn. Then my friend who came from Pondy suggested that I do an internship in Auroville.

I did my internship at Auroservice in the Town Hall. The experience didn’t just restrict me to my internship work but it gave me an opportunity to learn more about Auroville.     

Above all, here I started discovering myself again, including my interest in urban planning. Auroville brought back memories of how free I was when I was a child, for everybody here accepted me for what I was and encouraged me. So I decided I wanted to come back after my studies.

However, when I told my father I wanted to return to Auroville he was not happy. He wanted me to go to one of the cities that every cousin of mine went to: he didn’t want to send me to this new place.    

But then something happened which gave me the strength to stand up to my father and say this is what I have chosen. I had a friend in college whose sister had become an inspiration for me. When she was young she couldn’t do a lot of things, but she changed all of that and became a triathlete, an artist and a vegan mountain climber: she was breaking all the traditional barriers. But when she went trekking with a small group of women near Madurai there was a forest fire which trapped the whole group. After a few days of fighting for life in the hospital, she died.    

I kept hearing from friends and some of their parents that ‘This is why girls should not be allowed to do whatever they want alone. If they had had a man with them, they would have been safe’. Even my parents said that girls should not be allowed to do everything they want. That shattered me.

I asked my father, ‘What do you want me to do in life?’ He said, ‘Get a good job and settle down’. I said. ‘I want to do things differently. I want to focus on social issues, I want to be there for people who want me, and I want to discover who I want to be on that journey. I cannot run behind money; that is not my motivation.’ It was a shock for him. He said, ‘That’s not a life that cannot happen’. But he could see I was adamant, so in the end he didn’t try to stop me.

When I returned to Auroville I thought I would be working with Auroservice again, but Luigi told me they didn’t have the funds to support me. But I didn’t want to go back to my parents, I wanted to stay here. I remember well how helpless I felt. Then Luigi put me in touch with the Matrimandir team who were putting together a competition for the design of the Garden of the Unexpected. They wanted somebody with architecture experience, so I helped the competition team with communication and evaluation of designs.     

But this was only part-time work. One day I walked over to the Town Development office and asked if I could help there in any way. They interviewed and selected me for part time work and then it became full time after six months.    

It was refreshing to see town planning from a new perspective here than the one I was exposed to in my study. In my Chennai course we were trying to solve problems of existing developments, whereas in Auroville we had the opportunity to manifest a city by eliminating the conventional problems. The concept of Auroville city with interplay of green, blue and the developments was fascinating for the young architect I was.     

I liked the challenge of marrying the developments according to the Galaxy concept with the ground realities. I primarily worked on creating a Detailed Development Plan for the Residential Zone which we intended to build upon the previous studies. The attempt was to create a holistic plan which integrated all the aspects and those that were missing in previous studies. Emphasis was given to green corridors and water networks.     

Water became one of my prime interest areas not just in Auroville but also at a bioregion scale. I have developed an interest to protect the traditional knowledge of water management systems in our country and have been doing independent preliminary research on that.      

Now I’m working on a big water project with Sunlit Future which combines both the technical and social aspects which I am interested in. The project aims to bring water to remote villages in eight states using solar energy. Our aim is to cover 100 villages a year and so far almost 600 villages have benefitted. As the project manager, it involves me going to each village to see if it is technically feasible for us to provide them with solutions, and then to visit each village again during the implementation and for post-implementation surveys. 

Often these are remote tribal villages, and the only way to get to them is to trek there on foot. The people there live in beautiful ecosystems but they are under a huge stress due to lack of access to basic infrastructure and pressure from many external factors. Yet, they were for me a true embodiment of resilience, abundance and courage. Some women have told me that they felt happy to see a woman come that far to solve their problems. And I always told them that they were the source of my strength and my inspiration to go there.      

Through being involved in this project, I started doing many new things, like making movies and managing social media to communicate the story. Sunlit Future gives me this freedom: whenever I come up with new ideas, they encourage me.

Of course, the work involves a lot of traveling and can be quite exhausting, which makes my father wonder why I am doing such a stressful job. But I tell him it’s not stressful: in fact, I’m enjoying every moment.

I’ve also been involved in a lot of community events in Auroville. The first feeling I had when I came here and which stays with me, is that unlike in my birth village where there was always a kind of family connection with the people and everyone knew my background, here I’m a totally new person, and yet I feel accepted for what I am. And we are a community, we are a family. Even in difficult situations, this feeling has only become stronger for me.

For me it reinstated a faith that we can be connected not by blood relationship but by a very different, innate form of connection. That feeling is a very big core of whatever I am doing here.

It was at a very crucial moment that a group of us got together to organise a community potluck at Certitude with our big Auroville family just to celebrate the spirit of our community.     

If anybody asks me what the best thing is that I have achieved in Auroville, I would say that it was working on that. As one of the organisers, I was fascinated by the way everything fell into place and how about 95% of the resources were found within our community. Every help that we wanted came and we didn’t have to handle even a single rupee as cash to organise such a big event.     

That’s when I felt this community is great, because we received so much love and support. It was true that not everyone in the community participated, but I remember sending personalised invitations to everyone possible, keeping aside the disagreements. Some of them even acknowledged the invitation, yet didn’t feel able to participate.     

This reflects a certain breakdown in dialogue between certain sections of the community. Yet Dreamweaving gave me an opportunity to engage in healthy dialogue with people who had extremely opposite ideas to mine. This was because as architects we were focussed on bringing inclusive solutions and were willing to help each other achieve it.

Auroville has given me opportunities to discover myself and to refine more and more what I want to do with my life. My work at Sunlit Future focussed on providing water access to remotely located tribal habitations in various parts of India, which caused me to travel widely throughout India in the past few years and exposed me to various issues they are facing at the grassroots level. I have seen how all these ecosystems which are so rich are yet so vulnerable and I understood better what will happen if they break down. Working with NGOs on their water issues also gave me a new perspective, for they work on many other issues as well. I understood from this that water is not a stand-alone problem: there are so many interconnected elements which also need to be taken care of.

All this gave me a very rooted understanding of what is happening, and fuelled my passion to bring positive changes in society while protecting the indigenous knowledge and environment. It also helped me better understand what I need to do next towards realising this passion, which is to work on environmental conservation and planning.

I realised that I need to acquire knowledge and skills in those fields to be able to engage in meaningful action, so I applied and was accepted in a Masters programme in Environmental Conservation at the University of Wisconsin, starting in June, 2024. Subjects like conservation planning, climate change and issues of indigenous communities are part of the curriculum, which culminates in a practical training.    

It is a fantastic opportunity for me to learn from and network with peers from around the world, skills that I want to bring back to Auroville and India to help build the better future for which we all aspire.

The challenge now is finding the funding. I have to raise $45,000 by January 2024, although I‘m hoping I will get a scholarship to defray some of the cost. Meanwhile, I am embarking on crowd funding and appealing to the community in addition to other external grants that I am exploring for help to make my dream come true.

I remain very positive as I realise that everything that has happened in my life has brought me to this point. Because even if I didn’t understand at the time why certain things didn’t work out, I’m very happy about where I am now and what I am doing. I am sure that I will be where I want to be because I have you all with me in this.

For more information contact ginduja397@gmail.com