This is a lovely anthology compiled by Akash Kapur with 40 odd contributors of different nationalities to celebrate fifty years of Auroville, a city of human unity. The book is divided into sections - Foudnations, Departures and Arrivals, Ideals and reality, Work, The Earth, The First Citizens of Auroville, Maitrimandir and Love. It includes essays, fiction, poems, a play, cartoons and somehow, amazingly, they all seem to say the same thing. You get a great sense of how the idea came into existence and how so many people came together to build it and sustain it because they believe in the idea and put everything out to make it happen. Just for that, one senses, this idea, will, as the Mother said, could take as long as a thousand years to come to fruition, but its already there, in progress.
Auroville remains a mystery to many, an idea everyone wants to touch and see and wonder at. How can you have a community like this - that claims to bring together people from everywhere and create a city of human unity, a place were superminds in terms of spiritual consciousness exist. Created from the vision of Sri Aurobindo's (1872-1950) Integral Yoga, a scientific and spiritual vision of evolution to create a transformed world, a new spiritualised species. Integral Yoga recognises evolution on earth as an ongoing process. It does not see material evolution not as blind chance, but as an expression of will, of a hidden spirit, the possibility of a higher spiritual consciousness, the Supermind.
The actual idea of Auroville, in mud and stone and concrete, was however brought to reality by the Mother, Blanche Rachel Mitra Alfassa (1878-1973) whom Sri Aurobindo considered his spiritual equal and collaborator and it was under her guidance that on February 28, 1968, that a handful of earth from 124 nations and 23 states of India was mixed together in a lotus-shaped urn marking the founding of Auroville as a city of human unity. Located outside Pondicherry and adjoining the state of Tamil Nadu, Auroville was a barren land of 20 square kilometres with no trees (the forest had been cut down by the villagers) infested by snakes and scorpions and such. People came from faraway lands in their caravans, looking for this city, found nothing, traded their clothes for loincloths and got down to work, building the city. They built different communities with names like Bliss, Courage, Creativity. People with goodwill from all over the world were invited to join. Today there are 2500 members, from 50 nations, 45% of them Indians.
The writings and pictures convey what these intrepid dreamers faced - barren lands, no water, no shelter. They went about by trial and error, planting over 20 lakh trees, creating a full-grown community with all the facilities, power, education, water, sanitation, dams. There are people who drove all the way from France, those who left their parents and came away, those who felt that their soul lives in Auroville, those who recollect how they worked and worked and worked, failed and then worked again. The story of the man who was almost dying but would not go to a doctor and who left after that because he felt he violated some pact with himself, of the love story where the girl left for her hometown and later died of cancer, of those who left a world fo material comforts and landed in this hard idea. The way they built Maitrimandir and other significant landmarks, the way the community figured its way by itself is a wonderful story of cohabitation.
The energy in the writing, in what they created and the idea they wish to see fulfilled is very evident. I am all the keener to go to Auroville, walk along the communities and get a sense of what these wonderful people have created.
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