Issue Nº319

Alain Bernard, a trustee of Auroville Village Action, introduces the Sustainable Livelihood Institute (SLI) project, a joint project of Auroville and the Government of Tamil Nadu.

On Auronet, Auroville’s internal internet, a clock is already counting down the days to Auroville’s 50th birthday. However, not everybody is enthusiastically awaiting what is being planned for the event.

The preliminary planning team for the 50th anniversary will soon be completing its work. What was their task? Their vision? And how have they organized the work?

While the topic of youth is getting a lot of attention in Auroville recently, the focus on youth empowerment has long been a mission of the Pavilion of Tibetan Culture.

Auroville now has one of the few buses in India accessible for the differently-abled. But does this reflect a wider sensitivity to their needs and to general public safety in the community?

In the recent years, a number of new communities have come up. But residents of Inspiration and Maitreye I and II, all built by Auroville’s Housing Service, complain about bad designs and bad quality of construction.

Tapas Bhatt has long been associated with supporting the arts in Auroville and, in particular, with connecting Auroville to the world and the world to Auroville through the arts.

Gora, an awakened Indian mystic, was a potter. When his disciples grew in numbers and included kings and nobles, they told him to stop his pottery work as it was not appropriate for a master.

Hamish Boyd’s poetry is by turns witty, enigmatic, profound, joyful, funny, anguished, angry and moving, mirroring, perhaps, the many elements of his nature.

Imagine you’re tapping away on your computer, diligently doing your work for Auroville. It’s bucketing down rain outside, and your computer starts to assert its feelings about the monsoon humidity – stuck keys, a haywire cursor, documents that freeze and programmes that get stuck in never-ending sand clock icons… Just as your patience starts to disappear along with the sand sifting through the hourglass – the computer crashes altogether.