After Pondicherry I made my why to the utopia of Auroville. Auroville was founded in 1968 by The Mother, who was a follower of Sri Aurobindo. It intended to be an experiment in people living in “progressive harmonyâ€. Based on the idea that humanity is not the last rung on the evolutionary ladder, Auroville plans to be an accelerator for the next step. I should probably point out that Auroville isn’t really set up to accept “touristsâ€, and I only spent one day there, so my observations are really just first impressions.
The Vistor Centre
The Town Hall
The settlement contains around 1780 people from all over the world, spread over 20km. So I hired a bike and bravely set off to explore this new world. For the most part all I seemed to see were trees growing out of the red ground. One of the settlers later told me that they thought that their greatest achievement was the planting of over 2 million trees. It certainly is more luscious than the rest of India (at least what I’d seen). However I failed to see much more progress than that.
This may have been because the whole settlement was very dispersed. It was designed in the shape of a spiral galaxy; unfortunately no one remembered that galaxies are notoriously difficult to get around. I thought this was a rather large slipup which meant most people had to use petrol consuming motorbikes or cars to get around. So they’re not quite self sufficient!
I did visit the Cynergy, who were a small group that did computer programming outsourcing in the community. It was headed by a guy who was raised on the community. Definitely a different spin on Indian Outsourcing!
The highlight of the community is the Matrimandir, which is a temple/meditation center/ spiritual soul/giant golden golf ball in the middle of Auroville. Current it was undergoing extensive maintenance work, something to do with the gold panels not being attached properly. I managed to have a look around it, and then noticed that the Indian construction workers didn’t really seem to mind if I went inside (which I probably shouldn’t have!). I had heard amazing things about the interior, but it all seemed to be covered with plastic sheeting. I’m not sure if I made it into the main chamber, but it was an eerie feeling being inside. Kinda like I was exploring a lost temple!
Interestingly I met a couple of Dancers from California at Auroville who’d been in India training to be Yoga teachers. They’d had a lot of experience working in cooperative communities, egalitarian structures. They said it was very hard to make decisions, and often what happened was that the loudest person just got their way. They talked about consensus minus one, someone’s always unhappy!
Does cooperation really lead to the best decision being made? Can we have too much cooperation and not enough action?
Overall I was unimpressed with Auroville. I noticed that I always had this negative Hippy/Cult thought in the back of my head, despite my feeling that what they were trying to achieve here was very admirable, and important. I thought their was too much Yoga and Meditation and not enough Renewable Energy. I just got the feeling that there were too many spiritual types and not enough technical types.
Hippies on bike and windmills - kinda sums up my impressions
OK, there was some renewable energy
I thought about how necessary it is to have such a spiritual focus when setting up a community. I’m not sure how well spiritual, social and technical development can work together? I may leave that for another post.
January 30th, 2006
