“We have to focus on the big Auroville”

Auroville Today: How did you come to Auroville?

I was 22 years old and planning to leave France to go to Brazil on the first part of a world tour. Then I saw a magazine with people doing yoga on a beach in Goa and I decided to go to India instead. Before I left, I was asked to bring some car parts for someone who lived in a community in south India. His name was Vincenzo.

I reached Pondicherry at 6 o’clock in the morning and went to Aspiration where I met Vincenzo. I had a very direct, deep contact with him and we spent half a day together, during which he talked about Auroville.

I hadn’t come for Auroville and I was expecting to leave very soon to continue my travels. But, little by little, something happened and I ended up staying four years.

What held me here was an inner appeal: this was how Mother arranged for me to remain. I began working with Vincenzo, cutting steel at night for the construction of Auropress. Meanwhile I was asking everybody questions about this old lady in Pondicherry: I didn’t know anything about spirituality.

At this time in Aspiration there were two groups: the ‘vital’ group and a more ‘sattwic’ group that used to meditate together. I remember asking one of them in the latter group, “So you have no more ego?” and he laughed. For the first month, I was in the vital group. In the evening we would go for a swim, then drink beer in Pondicherry. But after one month I joined the sattwic group!

When did you first meet Mother?

I met Mother for the first time for my birthday on 1st November 1971. I gave her different flowers, like ‘protection’, ‘psychological perfection’ and ‘transformation’. She gave me a rose and then she gave me back the transformation flowers! That was it.

I can’t say I have had any spiritual experience with Mother; it is through matter that I worked for her. Vincenzo was the same. He smoked when cutting marble for the Urn, and the Ashramites complained to Mother that this kind of behaviour was impossible. But Mother said, “leave him be, let him work”. She was very practical.

When I first met Mother, it was a difficult time for me. I had a girlfriend in France who wanted to join me. At that time, we had to show a photograph to Mother of anybody who wanted to come to Auroville. 99% of the time she said ‘yes’, but this time she said ‘no’. Eventually, my girlfriend came and we spent the week in Pondicherry but then she left because she said I had been hypnotised by Mother. It was very tough for me because she was a nice person and I could not understand why Mother had not accepted her. Later, I understood. Mother had intervened so that I could stay in Auroville. If she had not done this, it would have represented a return to my old ways. Mother saved me many lifetimes of yoga.

I met Mother many times. I had begun working in Auropolyester [a polyester workshop that made housing units etc. eds.], and at one point Mother asked us to come once a week to show her new products. I also went sometimes for the Aspiration talks, when a small group from Aspiration community would go and ask Mother questions. But at one point I decided to stop seeing her. I had been waiting on the stairs outside her room when I heard an Ashramite speaking to her about his chickens. “I have so many chickens, should I take more?” It was terrible. I thought, ‘This is the universal Mother. Why are you are trying to bring her down to this?’ I thought, ‘How can I take another minute of Mother’s time?’, and I stopped going.

In 1972, I went back briefly to France.

I brought back a letter with a message from Andre Malraux. Mother had asked him if he wanted to be a sponsor for the centenary of Sri Aurobindo and he had agreed.

I had been told to give the letter to Satprem so that he could give it to Mother. When I reached Satprem’s house, I could hear music. I started climbing the steps but then he came out and said, very aggressively, ‘Why are you here?’

One month later I wrote to him, thanking him for his ‘kind’ welcome, and asking him if he could help me take away my ‘old skin’. He replied that he didn’t any longer see people but that he would be willing to meet me. I spent one and a half hours with him and it was great. His essential message was that I had to find Mother inside myself.

How did you feel when Mother left her body?

I couldn’t believe it at first because every few months the bulletin from the Ashram was coming out where she spoke in detail of the supramental body and its functioning. So I was 100% sure that Mother was going to have this body.

So at first there was disbelief, then pain and I was angry with Mother for leaving us. I was also revolted by the way that the Ashram had allowed everybody to see Mother’s body. It was terrible because Mother had said that if anything happened to her, her body must be kept quiet, undisturbed.

Were you tempted to leave Auroville then?

No, I accepted that we would have to carry on the work for her. But one year after Mother’s passing I left to try to commercialise Auroville products in France. I would surely not have left if Mother had still been in her body.

I stayed in France for some years. I began working in real estate with my brother, renovating apartments and big buildings. But I retained a close contact with Auroville and was coming here every year for two or three months.

Some people who have been here from the beginning look back and say those early years were the golden age of Auroville. Do you share this view?

No, I have no nostalgia for those times. I believe in the future of Auroville, not in the past. And Mother is alive, she is here, she’s completely with us. Even Roger, Kireet, Satprem, they are all here. We are just ignorant; we cannot push aside the veil.

You were very close to Roger Anger.

I first met Roger in 1971 when he was working in the Auroville architecture office in Pondicherry but did not have a close contact with him then. He left India in 1975 mainly because of the problems with the Sri Aurobindo Society – he felt they were preventing him doing his work – but also he was frustrated with the Aurovilians. He was doing the plans for the steel town of Salem to bring money into Auroville but some people were telling him he should only work for Auroville.

I had a much closer contact when he came back to Auroville in 1987. He arrived with the second model of the Matrimandir and I went to meet him at the airport. I told him that it was time for him to live in Auroville rather than Pondicherry and he agreed.

My house in Auromodèle had just been finished so I shared it with him and Jacqueline. From that moment, we became close. We shared so much work, including the planning of the town and the coordination of Matrimandir.

I have always searched for beauty, and Roger had a wonderful talent for this. Mother gave me a big gift by letting me share part of Roger’s life.

Why was Roger so insistent that the city should be built as soon as possible?

Mother asked him to build it. Roger said Mother had told him that she went within and showed Sri Aurobindo the model of the town and he found it wonderful, so beautiful, creative. So when she came out of the trance she told Roger, “Build my city”. This is one of the reasons why he felt it was so important for the city to be built.

However, as this is the first divine town that wants to manifest in the world, there is much resistance from certain forces, and these forces take people hostage. It makes them say that we don’t want the city, we only want a village. Roger suffered very much from this.

But we should understand that to materialise this town is the most wonderful opportunity. And it is already here in the subtle physical: we just have to bring it down.

I am sure that I have received, first from Mother and then from Roger, the energy to participate in the building of the city. If I take the case of Citadines [two apartment blocks in the centre of Auroville, eds.], while I was the main project-holder and raised much of the funding, I can say I have not done anything; Mother has done it. It was a challenge to have constructed these two buildings in two years but at the end there were 50 Aurovilians working joyfully together on it: it was a wonderful experience. This is the joy of building her city.

What was the inspiration behind Citadines?

I saw it as a kind of utopia in the larger utopia of Auroville. I wanted to offer a decent living place to those people dedicated to Auroville who have been here a long time but cannot afford a place of their own; 80% of the apartments are given as a gift. It is also for Newcomers who want to work for Auroville and to experiment with living a fraternal life in a residential area where we share much in common (restaurant, laundry, service workshop, art centre etc.), but who have limited financial means.

In the next project we are doing, Sunship, we will also be giving 50% of the apartments as a gift: it will be in exactly the same spirit as Citadines.

Meanwhile, we have constructed some temporary structures near Citadines to provide accommodation for young volunteers who could not afford to stay in the guesthouses. I feel we have a responsibility to shelter them if they want to participate in the experiment of Auroville. We are planning to reproduce this experiment elsewhere in Auroville.

After Sunship is completed, I would like to be part of a team constructing a Line of Force [one of a series of mega-structures that help define the shape of the Galaxy plan eds.] for 2,000 people and to give 90% of them free. We need to have at least 2,000 people more in Auroville because the real solution to accelerating Auroville’s development lies in increasing our population.

We have to find big money to do this, but Auroville is a big project. Some of us have never thought big, which is one reason why the development of the city is going so slowly, but now I feel there is a change in the wind. The architect has started to work on the architecture of the first Line of Force. Meanwhile, there is a team working on a proposal to start to construct a big viewing point near the Visitors Center that would be the end of another Line of Force. This Line of Force would accommodate 10,000 people.

We have to demonstrate that the Lines of Force will be the most collective and ecological way of living in Auroville. In the first Line of Force, the first three levels will be collective spaces – for restaurants, a library, shops and services – and all the other floors will be the apartments. We will use natural ventilation and ecological materials and the building will be integrated into nature. We also want to maintain a certain level of consciousness in the way people live there.

How will you achieve this?

Through guidelines. In Citadines we have guidelines, like no air-conditioners, no personal ammas, pets or personal washing machines, which everybody observes. We have shown it is possible to live like this in fraternal solidarity, and that individuality can be preserved in the context of collective living.

Auromodèle was meant to be an early model for the city but it turned into a community of independent homes. Have we learnt from that experience?

I think Auromodèle failed because of human nature. Everybody wanted their privacy. They put up fences and had their own ammas and gardeners. Perhaps this experiment was too advanced for us at that time. Or perhaps it would have been better to have started the town right away…

You are part of a group that is putting a lot of energy into the International Zone at the moment. Why?

The International Zone is the main focus for Auroville’s relationship with the world, so it is very important. It is also the biggest project in Auroville. In Roger’s final layout, there will be around 70,000 square metres of constructed space, including the Centre of International Research in Human Unity (CIRHU). This will have auditoria, laboratories, exhibition spaces and accommodation for researchers. There will also be accommodation prioritised for those working in the Zone (I am constructing ‘Terra Amata’, one of these residential complexes).

Of course, there will also be the pavilions of different cultures. Mother said that the International Zone is primarily for the Aurovilians, and that each pavilion has to express the soul of its country, so that each person who lives here can also identify with the soul of his or her country.

We have to bring life to the International Zone. The priority now is to lay down the infrastructure and to get people living on the land to prevent encroachment. I hope that soon the governments of different countries will be able to finance the pavilions of their countries. Meanwhile, we will have temporary structures, like the Pavilion of France.

Has your idealism in any way become diluted over the years?

I am frustrated because I see a very slow development of the city and I am aware that many of the problems we are facing are created by ourselves. For example, we have an extreme of bureaucracy: we have far too many working groups even for a town of 50,000!

At the same time, I never stopped believing in the ideal. Roger told me that I am a ‘pathological optimist’, but I am one hundred percent optimistic about the development of the International Zone and the rest of the city.

Collectively, we can choose to focus on the small Auroville or the big Auroville. I have faith that it is the big one coming down.

I have always kept the smile, the joy. Auroville is a unique experiment: every day is Mother’s miracle. It is a huge privilege to participate in the Dream and to help manifest Her vision. I am very grateful to Her.