Issue Nº380 – In Memoriam

On February 4, Dany Foureau unexpectedly passed away due to sudden cardiac arrest in her room in the Mukti Complex near the AV Health Centre. She had been complaining about back pain after lifting a possibly too heavy load a week ago. She was 60 years old.

Dany, who hails from France, had a long history with Auroville. In the early seventies, she rebelliously left her parental home and joined a a small community of friends in the Ardèche, where she stayed as young girl. Like several other members of that community, Dany came to Auroville in 1980, starting out in Forecomers. One of the things she did at the time was working with Otto in Kottakarai Bakery. She then moved to Revelation where she ran a small vegetable market. Later, she married an Indian man and the couple left for France around 1984. Some five years later she returned, with toddler son Salia, and worked for New Creation’s Kindergarten while staying in New Creation Field community.

Several years later she left again, to return for good in 2014 on her own, her son being well established with his own family and two children. By now well versed in geriatric care, she joined the Auroville Health Service team, training new therapists and taking over its coordination. There followed a year in which she worked on the night shift of Auromode Apartments, during which time she also frequented the Auroville Integrated Animal Care Centre (IACC). In 2017 she left Auromode and took up full time work at IACC while living in Prayatna (as caretaker of the Newcomer accommodation there) and later moved to Mukti. It was at IACC that Dany came into her full element, joining the team of Kannan, Rita and Lorraine, and giving all her energy and passion to the hundreds of dogs in the centre’s care.

Dany’s remains were cremated at the Adventure Burial and Cremation grounds on February 7th.

On January 30th, Matthias passed away in his room at Mahalakshmi Home, ending a year-long struggle with cancer metastases in his lungs and brain. He had just celebrated his 74th birthday with close friends attending.

Having completed his studies in physics and pedagogy at Frankfurt’s Main University in Germany, Matthias started out as an electro-mechanic. In his own words: “Very early I developed a fetish for all things technical and I liked to play guitar and double-bass and joined a pop-band and later a jazz-band, where I fell in love with the singer and she became my first wife. Then I became a private and commercial pilot, and started my first own company producing language-laboratories.

“In 1977, when I had just become 30 years of age, I travelled for the first time to India with a German jazz band (the Barrelhouse Jazzband from Frankfurt – they still play!). I very much liked it there and inquired how one could live there. We were playing for the German Cultural Institutes and it happened just then that they needed a new Regional Engineer for South Asia. I immediately applied for the job and by the end 1977 I was posted to New Delhi with the Goethe Institute (Max Mueller Bhavan) for the next five years.”

While stationed in Delhi, Matthias with his (second) wife Marusch got to know about Auroville. Also, at times Aurovilians would stay in their house. The result was that the couple joined Auroville in 1984, and soon Matthias gravitated towards Aurelec, where computers were made. Having worked there for several years, he formed his own ‘Altecs Energy Systems’, which produced solar charge-controllers, PL-lamps and inverters, helping more than 100 houses in Auroville to become totally self-sufficient in solar energy. The unit manufactured its own inverters from 80VA to 5kVA and installed solar-pumps in and around Auroville. He thoroughly trained a large team of young aspiring Tamils. When Altecs had to close because it could no longer meet its loan repayment obligations, he went back to Germany to earn money to repay the loans. After he returned to Auroville, he organized the building of the multi-storey Altecs building in Auroshilpam and the Kailash Youth complex on the Crown Road.

Being the open, good willing and authentic person he was, Matthias helped others till the very end with his knowledge and expertise in electronic and other matters. In the beginning of 2020 his physical problems started, and after a first operation he quietly moved to Mahalakshmi Home, where he was warmly received. Very often surrounded by close friends, who helped him prepare for this challenging phase of his life, he was clear-headed, ready and faithful to go.

Matthias’s remains were buried at the Adventure Burial and Cremation grounds on February 3rd, 2020.

Auroville’s pioneer Peter Kuhrt – also known as Stream – passed away on January 28th in a Munich hospital due to heart failure. He was 76.

Peter came to Auroville with the caravan of 1969, together with Michel Klostermann, Christl, Joachim and Dorothee Hach. The group of Munich friends had read about the inauguration of Auroville in a German magazine and decided then and there to come. They had written to the Sri Aurobindo Society but never received an answer, so they just started off in an old Volkswagen bus, driving overland for six weeks and reaching Pondicherry in November, 1969. In due time the group was assigned some accommodation in Auroville’s Aspiration community.

Originally born in East-Prussia, Peter had grown up and studied in Germany. In Auroville he stayed for a few years in Aspiration, doing garden work, working at the AuroPolyester unit, and growing more passionate about painting. Later on, he lived for some time in the Pump House and in Existence (naming it ‘Edge of Existence’).

Residents who know him from that time remember him as a quiet, interiorised person, very gentle and kind-hearted. They observed that the intensity of his inner life came through in his art, and that he, as an artist, saw himself in a state of transition, without thinking that he had “already arrived”. He considered such thinking as the greatest danger to creativity. That he took on the name ‘Stream’ may be a reflection of this transitory stance.

After some ten years he left, feeling unsupported and insecure, realising that Auroville at that stage was not a place for artists. Friends who knew him in his later years in Germany tell us that he lived his life as an artist to the bone. He had no cell phone or internet, and lived with the utmost simplicity, only being concerned with painting, which was the strong yoga which carried him through everything. He was a true and faithful soul and Aurovilian until his last breath.