Issue Nº376

Auroville is seeing an increase in bureaucracy. The Funds and Assets Management Committee proposes to enlarge its 12-page Code of Conduct for trusts and units of the Auroville Foundation to a 40-page document: the Town Development Council has come up with an empanelment process for contractors in Auroville and has initiated a process for how to deal with people who build without building permissions; the Entry Board is facing official “Auroville Foundation (Admission and termination of Persons in the register of residents) Regulations 2020; and there is an increasing ‘imposition’ of regulations from outside Auroville.

Auroville City Conversations is the online discussion forum of the exhibition The City The Earth Needs, which has been in the Unity Pavilion since February.

One Saturday morning in November 2017, a bunch of Auroville youth hanging out in the Solar Kitchen parking lot had the ‘wild idea’ to clean-up some of the ever-increasing amounts of rubbish in Auroville.

Joy of Impermanence (JOI) is an umbrella project that aims to create new communities in Auroville based on impermanence and sustainability.

Home birth is rather common and very accessible here in Auroville, and I was one of those lucky children to evacuate my warm private cocoon straight into what would be my home for my first 19 years.

In 2020, one subject attracted maybe as much attention as the pandemic itself: “masks”. This simple but nowadays also potent word is able to trigger emotions, opinions, reflection and action.

On World Ocean Day in June, a dolphin washed up on to Sri Ma beach. “It was a young dolphin that had not died a natural death, possibly related to pollution, or to swallowed plastic,” says Satya Agrawal, a teacher in NESS school, who was catalysed by this event to start collecting waste on the beach.

It’s deceptive… It looks like it could only have been constructed using a JCB or other heavyweight lifting mechanism. But I had a big surprise when Supriya Pava explained to me that her latest sculpture is as light as a feather.

Some years ago, Vikas (Alan Vickers), one of the pioneer Aurovilians, brought out a slim anthology of Auroville poetry called 50 poems from Auroville.

Radicle Network is a fast-paced thriller by an Auroville greenworker, Paul Blanchflower, that takes a look at the world we live in and the current environmental crisis that we have created.

It is 2030, and over the past months, ten strange objects that seem to have emerged straight from the past have been found in Auroville. Miraculously reclaimed from the depths of old, forgotten cupboards and reappearing in the most unlikely of places, they are submitted to deep scientific scrutiny with surprising results.

In the previous edition of Auroville Today, we mentioned the publication of Nadia Loury's bilingual (French/English) photographic book, Auroville 80, which captures the poetry of daily life of the Aurovilians in the 1980s.