Place

I met Dr Boglarka Nagy (Bogi), a warm, smiley woman, at the Global Ecovillage Network Europe gathering in Hungary in August 2025. Hers was one of the best workshops I attended at the gathering.

Aurovilians Ivar Jenten and Brigitte Vink, both originally from the Netherlands, have been working with village children for many years. In June 2021 they founded Isai Ragam under Auroville’s Auromitra Trust.

Auroville exists in more than one dimension – there is the occult as well as the material dimension – which makes it difficult to assess what really is most important or influential in terms of the community’s development.

Daniel Helman Lee grew up in Auroville, graduated from Future School in 2019 and studied in Maastricht, The Netherlands, before moving to Israel, where she is now enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts creative writing programme in Tel Aviv.

This is the charming illustrated story of a young boy who seeks, in the midst of an arid landscape, for a way to restore the monsoon, and who finds the clue while asleep “on the mountain where all journeys end”.

In October, the Centre d’Art hosted an exhibition by artist in residence Nandita Sharma. Titled “The thinking hand”, she explained that her work moves between words and images.

Nishtha (Siegfried) Mueller is a long-term Aurovilian, Sanskrit teacher, Veda researcher, and passionate life-long learner. For more than forty years he has devoted himself to Sri Aurobindo’s The Secret of the Veda and Hymns to the Mystic Fire, to the study and restoration of some of the ancient hymns and to sharing a living approach to Sanskrit with spiritual seekers.

Maël Vidal was born and grew up in Auroville before going to France to pursue higher studies, where he received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in social anthropology.

From clunky prototypes to a thriving EV ecosystem, Auroville’s journey mirrors India’s evolving electric vehicle landscape – driven by innovation, resilience, and a vision for sustainable transport.

The German Government set up the Weltwärts programme to allow young Germans to volunteer in a different country for 6-18 months in areas like education, health, environment, culture and human rights, in order to broaden their minds and strengthen international understanding.

In a recent issue of News & Notes, a twelve-week course on kolams was announced. It would help people, it said, to “find their compass, reorientate and be able to prioritise direction, regulate boundaries and thresholds within themselves and the surrounding world”.

Between 5-24 September, Centre d’Art hosted an exhibition by the local artist, P Saravanam, titled “Together”. In a world which seems to be getting speedier and more complicated day by day, Saravanam’s art returns us to the simple joys of everyday life and encounters in the villages of India.

The following are excerpts from volunteers' final reports after 12 months in Auroville A transformative year that still resonates Much time has passed since my Weltwärts year in 2008-09.

Chali reflects on the fractures within Auroville and on the possibilities of restoration.

John Mandeen passed away just over a year ago. John was a photographer who worked for many years with the Ashram Press, but he also extensively documented life in Auroville from the early 1980s, including important stages in the construction of the Matrimandir.

On 13 August, the managers of Annapurna Farm received an email signed by three working groups constituted by the Governing Board – the Funds and Assets Management Committee, L’Avenir d’Auroville (Auroville’s Town Development Council) and the Farm Service – stating: “It has been decided to allocate 100 acres of Auroville land at Annapurna for the IIT [Indian Institute of Technology, eds.]

On 14 August Dr. Karan Singh, who has been Chairman of the Governing Board of the Auroville Foundation for more than 20 years, briefly visited Auroville.

In October 2024 we interviewed Dan Capdeville who launched the “Seeking Our Inner Being” project in January of that year. Now, one and a half years later, he has decided to formally close it down.

In 2018, Amrit published ‘Children of Change’, a memoir recounting his early life and the difficult years in Auroville when he and others chose not to take sides in the bitter conflict between the Sri Aurobindo Society (SAS) and the then-dominant Auroville collective.

Auroville has a striking new art gallery – Maji. Located in the compound of Maroma, which is sponsoring the initiative, the first exhibition, ‘Petals’, opened in February 2025 and featured artists from the project’s first ceramics residency.

How an Israeli top lawyer joins Auroville to become a sound healer.

Maatram is a mental-health support centre in Auroville staffed by professionally trained psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, and counsellors who work collaboratively to offer compassionate, person-centred care.

In 1989, more than three decades ago, a retired British police sergeant and school welfare officer visited Auroville. Having recently lost his wife, Roy Wicks was in search of new meaning and purpose.

Bob Zwicker has worked in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives for 52 years, with particular responsibility for the Mother’s works. Recently, three new books have been published containing new material not published in the Centenary edition of The Mother’s Collected Works.

Tucked away in a small room at the back of Auroville’s Vanaville unit is Michel’s bookbinding sanctuary — a quiet space where hundreds of worn books have been given a new lease on life.

Once upon a time a very long time ago, deep in the woods at the bottom of a mountain — Mother’s Mountain, mata-giri—a six-page newsletter called Collaboration came into being.

On 17 April, long-term Aurovilian Frederick Schulze Buxloh was informed that his application for visa extension had been denied. The decision sparked widespread concern, leading to a petition addressed to Indian authorities that garnered over 4000 signatures.

Manya Sekar, who came to Auroville in her teens, will soon start pursuing her higher education at Oberlin College in the USA. Here she talks about her experience in Auroville.

Jyoti Naoki Eri was born in Kyoto, Japan, to accomplished artist parents. He trained as a sculptor in Japan through a traditional apprenticeship process.

“Auroville will be a place of unending education”, says its Charter. The entirety of Auroville is envisioned by The Mother as an evolving educational campus encompassing all facets of life.

For almost two decades, Rosa lived in Auroville, immersed in the transformative work of Awareness Through the Body (ATB). Now she is bringing ATB workshops and advanced training to South America and plans to work with educators and trauma therapists in underserved areas, providing training that facilitates trauma release and inner balance.

It all started in September 1998. Jean-François and I were at home when a group of teenagers, familiar faces from the Auroville schools, walked in with a quiet determination.

The January 2025 issue of Auroville Today focused on the aftermath of Cyclone Fengal, which breached the Lego block dam separating sections 1 and 2 of the Matrimandir Lake.

A year ago, architect David Nightingale talked about how Spiral Dynamics could provide one way of understanding the present situation in Auroville.

In May 2024, the Governing Board of the Auroville Foundation approved the creation of the Auroville Physical Education Board (APEB), and allocated an in-principle budget of ₹2 crores (approx.

Auroville Today: What was your childhood like, how did your own musical journey begin? Shalini: My journey with music began very young. Singing was always central to my life, but never through formal education.

It’s easy to overlook the bark of a tree – especially here in Auroville, where trees are everywhere and we pass them daily, often without stopping to truly see.

On Saturday, 1 March, the community was invited to come to Cinema Paradiso to hear community members telling short stories; transformative memories of the past or hopeful dreams about the future of Auroville.

On Saturday, 8 March, It Matters hosted a book launch event. B (Bill Sullivan) was launching his book Being which, he explained, is to prepare young children for modern life: “The new ones who are coming now really need to get the best start because the world is in crisis.

Founded in 2020, the BORN IN FIRE residency at Phoenix Potteries (Auromodѐle) has become an important space for ceramic artists to refine their skills in anagama (‘cave’ in Japanese, it is a single-chamber, wood-fired kiln, often built into a hillside, known for its unique firing process and the natural ash glazes it produces, creating unpredictable and beautiful results) and wood firing.

It Matters is a space for artists and the community to connect, collaborate, and create. Rooted in Auroville’s spirit of exchange, it fosters dialogue and new ideas beyond the local art scene.

As I was looking through the minutes of the last Governing Board meeting regarding proposed changes to the Auroville Foundation Act, I recalled that when the Act was originally being prepared, there were already two different tendencies.

A few weeks ago a new biography of The Mother was published. The Mother: A Life of Sri Aurobindo’s Spiritual Collaborator is written by Peter Heehs, a reputed historian who has been a researcher in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives for over 50 years, writing biographies of Sri Aurobindo and publishing papers on related topics.