Solitude Farm

Embroiled in a land issue, as seven members of the neighbouring panchayats claimed that part of Solitude Farm was partially built on temple land.

One year ago, people searching YouTube for videos about Auroville would have noticed that many of the items that first showed up were produced by people who had visited Auroville for only a few days.

On 27th January Solitude farm invited people to participate in a food performance with live music. They were blindfolded at Solitude Cafe’s entrance and guided through a localicious, vegan, seven-course meal of locally-grown food and fusion cuisine.

For the last two years, Aurovilian Nina Sengupta has been offering edible weed walks around Auroville. Every few weeks, participants venture out and discover parts of a hidden Auroville that are plainly in view.

In ‘normal’ times, Aurovilians have a great deal of choice when it comes to dining in cafes and restaurants, or buying groceries to cook at home.

Auroville’s grocery outlets have begun to be stocked with an all-new collection of hemp-based products. Hempseed oil, hemp flour, and hemp hearts have hit the shelves thanks to Hemplanet, an Auroville unit that aims to promote the use of a wide array of hemp derivatives and eventually begin hemp cultivation in Auroville.

The City Services Lunch Scheme began more than 10 years ago as a way of enlarging the in-kind maintenance system. It was developed to help those working in the services to supplement the monthly maintenance which was not enough to cover the basic needs of living and working here.

The International Zone Coordination Team shared the International Zone’s latest developments and future plans in an open community meeting in January.

Demonetisation – this brittle word with its short, sharp syllables, gained currency overnight with the draconian move of the Indian Government to invalidate Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes.

The deeper vision behind Food Link, an activity of the Auroville Farm Group is to create community by linking the residents of Auroville to the farmers through educational initiatives.

“All of the issues are interconnected,” says Krishna on a sultry summer afternoon, when asked about Solitude Farm’s Circle Garden Project. “The issue of water, the issue of land use, the question of why there is a stockpile of Auroville-grown rice sitting at Annapurna Farm, the question of our relationship to food and where it comes from.

Tomas and Krishna farm on different scales and in different ways. Tomas manages the 134 acres of Annapurna Farm; Krishna farms six acres of Solitude in the ‘non-till’ Fukuoka style.