By Shannon Warren

The sound of Tibetan monks chanting lovely, rhythmic prayers reaches my ears as I round the corner to go down the back path to the Tibetan pavilion.  I am coming from an hour and a half massage on the beach and this relaxing music seems to be the perfect way to continue my feeling of contentment and connectedness.  Tonight is very special for our little home away from home, the Tibetan Pavilion is to host “A Prayer For Unity”, a collective meditation ceremony that is usually done on New Year’s Eve.  This year, however, it will take place on the night of the full moon as Kalsang and her family had to cancel the New Year’s Eve ceremony due to cyclone damage.

As I pull in to the circle driveway, I can see and feel that the place has been transformed.  Children play as neighbors, friends, and members of our group fill little pots with oil and lay them on the pre-drawn patterns.  Everyone is quiet and smiling, it is as if the meditation has already begun.  Eager to help, I hurry to put down my things and join in the preparation.  As I pour oil into the little pots alongside my friends, I can’t help but feel that I am taking part in something special.  It is hard to imagine that in a matter of hours, all of these candles will be lit and there will be people meditating everywhere, joining together to welcome a new year with serenity and open hearts.

As soon as all the candles are laid out a few of us hurry to the Visitor’s Center for an early dinner.  Our table is abuzz with excitement as we quickly finish our meals.  We know that by the time we go back the transformation will be complete and the Tibetan pavilion will be filled with people and lit up with candles.

Coming back from dinner the road is busier than I’ve ever seen it and the pavilion is more beautiful than I could have imagined.  Candles light the path from the road to the circular driveway guiding our way through the darkness.  People quietly smile and greet one another as they slowly drift in to the courtyard, which is full of people sitting in different meditation poses and concentrating on transcendence.

We are so fortunate to have been able to participate in this event that is known and anticipated throughout Auroville.  I ask Kalsang, our hostess at the Tibetan Pavilion, about the event and her eyes light up.  She and her family started the meditation ceremony in 1997 and 2012 was the first year that it had not taken place on the new year.  She explains that the ceremony is based on the Tibetan Festival of Light which takes place in October.  Like many things in Auroville, it is taken from an existing tradition and made unique to fit the community.  Kalsang says that she chose the new year, “to unite people in the last and first moments of the year” and that it is about togetherness and, as its name suggests, unity. 

I climb to very top of the roof with some other classmates to get a bird’s eye view and the scene below is spectacular.  We sit together, only speaking to one another in whispers and take in the spectacle around us.  The flickering candles reflect the stars and the light of the full moon makes the sky a dusky blue.  The “ohm” in the monks’ chant flows through the night air like a pulse and I can almost feel my own heart beating in time.  As I gaze upon the serene group of strangers and new friends below, I think of the uncertain months to come.  Like many of my classmates, the path ahead isn’t quite clear to me yet, but moments like this make me realize that wherever I go, whatever I do, I won’t be alone.  We are praying for unity and we have it, at least for now.

By Chantelle Lusebrink

In India, what surprises me most is the ability of people to persevere. With Cyclone Thane, the worst to hit this area in decades, tearing through the region just over 10 days ago, I’m inspired that everywhere around me seems to be bustling with activity.

In the hours before the storm had even passed, several family business owners had braved the wind and the rain to open up shop, providing people with needed supplies, like food and water. But it wasn’t easy for them to get there. Many traveled an hour plus on roads littered with large trees and power lines, which had thankfully been turned off by the government the evening before. Unfortunately, they arrived to their store fronts only to find their front spaces damaged structurally by debris or water. Amazingly, they pressed on with family members helping to bail water from the store front and cut away fallen trees.

Rural village store front plagued by flooding after Cyclone Thane.

It didn’t stop there, though. While many of us, having come from developed countries, would simply wait for power and road crews to cut through the debris and restore power, that isn’t an option in rural India. Without immediate access or government public services to do this type of work, villagers organized themselves, sending one able-bodied male family member to help clear the roadways in the days and weeks after the storm. Machetes in hand, they cut trees from roadways to make them passable, restoring power poles and lines to their upright state and helping other villagers shore up homes was the new work order of the day for many men. Meanwhile, women in the villages, many of whom work in and around Auroville for better pay, tried to return to work as quickly as possible.

Several men help pull a village fishing vessel onto the beach in the days after Cyclone Thane.

Astoundingly, with the quick and organized work to clear the roads, the most pressing of needs could be addressed; water. Unfortunately, many of the water wells in this area are pumped using electricity and without power, villagers who share these wells go without water. The road crews, however, were able to clear major thoroughfares to many large community wells quickly, allowing reserve generators to roam from community to community pumping water to fill the wells adequately for short periods of time.

While the generator was used to fulfill pressing needs, the people who run businesses and organizations in Auroville have showed tremendous resiliency in the midst of continuing power outages, water rationing and personal loss. Take the staff at Morgan Café, with limited power they manage to turn out fantastic and nourishing meals via limited generator use. Employees at Upasana, managed to the clear the large tree that had come down and blocked access to the shop and started work on organic cotton clothing and other lifestyle items quickly. Well Café, which serves a dual purpose as both an eatery and space for culinary education and vocational skills, also re-opened despite significant damage to its building and structures. 

Coconut grove demolished after Cyclone Thane near the East Coast Road.

At Marc’s Coffee, espresso wasn’t the order of most days after the storm, but pastry and sustainable filtered black coffee sourced from India was. Despite dwindling product reserves, founder and roaster, Marc Tormo, waited nearly two weeks for the generator to fill enough community bore wells before requesting it for business use over night so he could keep his store front running.

“The most important thing is to ensure people have water,” Marc said January 10, during the roasting. “The rest, we can figure out. It’ll be a late night, but I’m glad we’re able to roast.”

When the generator arrived, he made the most of it, roasting several large batches of his specialty coffees until the late hours of the night to provide work for his employees and to continue to provide coffee to the communities in and around Auroville.

The evening even turned into a bit of a celebration with espresso drinks all around and the roasting of the coveted Monsooned Malabar beans he had procured from the Malabar Coast. The beans are special because they are left in the open and swollen to absorb the moisture, winds and aromas of the monsoon air, much the way these beans had during the East India Company trading days when the beans would make the long voyage by ship from India to England and other places in Europe.

“We’re creating something here that is a piece of history,” Marc said. “Not only here at Marc’s Coffee, but in Auroville.”  

Founder of Marc's Coffee, Marc Tormo, roasts new coffee by dim light and generator two weeks after Cyclone Thane.

It’s this genuine drive to move forward and to press on that keeps people in Auroville and the surrounding communities moving on, past the destruction and devastation. The resiliency of the human spirit here has been inspiring to watch and I’m thankful to have witnessed it.

By André Lavergne

Sanjeevi Nagar is a village of roughly 1000 homes located in the cyclone-affected area of southeast India, just a few kilometers northwest of Auroville. When we arrived there to start work less than a week after the storm hit, the village was still without electriciy and so we found its residents far less busy than they care to be. While neighbouring villages were still clearing roads, the fallen trees of Sanjeevi Nagar had already been arranged in piles by the side of the road. While it’s true that the village held up to the winds better than many others, good fortune is only part of the story. That short work was made of the clean up here, is no surprise to the residents themselves. With or without electricity, Sanjeevi Nagar prides itself on its work ethic, entrepreneurial spirit and skilled craftsmen.

The village is the birthplace of Balu, perhaps one of the most entrepreneurial people we’ve met in Auroville. He heads not one, but two of the non-governmental organizations with which AUP is working. As director of the Mohanam Cultural Center, he has helped provide programs which engage local youth in the cultural vitality of Sanjeevi Nagar and make it possible to share its art, music, dance and cuisine with the outside world. Balu has more ideas than he has time to implement, including some very big plans for his home town. This is where we come in.

Katie and I have undertaken the first step in a longer term village branding project aimed at communicating Sanjeevi Nagar’s culture, knowledge and values. Phase one focuses heavily on listening and storytelling, and will result in the creation of an ongoing participatory online compendium of stories from the village. This morning marked the first of a series of loosely scheduled village walks. The plan is to meet with as many villagers as we can while we are here, in order to gather their impressions and stories of life in Sanjeevi Nagar. Accompanying us are Murugan, Madhu and Raja, three twenty-something alumni of the Mohanam Cultural Center’s youth programs. Their involvement from the start is crucial both as contributors with their own stories to tell and as the keepers of this living online resource. Fortunately for us, they are exceptionally qualified for the job. Murugan is a trusted member of Balu’s Bamboo Research Center team. And Madhu and Raja are both students in Visual Communication at Achariya Arts and Science College.

Our first village walk this morning introduced us to husband and wife entrepreneurs and a team of ten artisans, all working in terra cotta, with over thirty years of experience between them. Tomorrow, we will meet stone carvers, the day after that, leather workers, and this weekend, a local healer and expert in traditional medicine. Of the countless stories these streets could tell, we will likely only be able to experience a handful. But our hope is that the pieces will be in place for the storytelling to go on, long after we’ve gone.

by Deborah First-Quao

Today started like all other days except the 3am temple music. Barking dogs, alarm clocks, shuffling feet, and blazing sun you can’t keep out of the blinds. I had started on my website for the PSDF (People’s Social Development Foundation), an NGO in Pondicherry which aimed at improving the socio-economic welfare of the Dhalit community and fought for their basic human rights as well. By the afternoon I was already putting together a slideshow of the cyclone’s damage to Dhalit villages which could be used as an appeal for donations for their cyclone relief fund.

After a simple lunch of ratatouille and rice accompanied with a glass of lemonade at Town Hall, I rode my pedal bike over to Visitor’s Center for a huge glass of strawberry, vanilla, and coffee crunch ice cream. Just when I thought my day couldn’t get better, at 2:19pm I received the following text:

“Sadhana Forest! Tonight! Cool Deep eco space. Two departure times: 4pm for visit, meal, movie. 6pm for movie and meal. Aurorville Bus departs from Solar Kitchen. 200 rupee donation.”

There was no way I was going to get the the 4h30 bus by the time I had finished talking to my roommate Sorana about her amazing experience volunteering with an NGO called Maximo Nivel in Costa Rica, building a room in a church. At 6 0 clock I was on the bus, my mind filled with images of tree houses, huts and gypsies. After a 20 minute bus ride from Solar Kitchen we arrived. Sadhana Forest was pretty at night. All the houses were big open bamboo huts. They were all welcoming, but a bit troubling to me because they didn’t seem like one could get any privacy in them.

The first thing on the programme was the film. The title was BORN FREE, a true story of a British couple, Joy and George Adamson. In the beginning, George, is sent on an assignment to hunt down a man-eating lion in the Baran region of Uganda. While searching they are unexpectedly attacked by the lioness of the maneating lion. In their surprise they shoot her, realizing later that she had only attacked them to protect her sleeping cubs. In his guilt, George takes the 3 cubs home to his wife and they end up raising the cubs. Plans are eventually made to send them to the zoo. Troubled by his wife’s attachment to Elsa, the smallest, most curious and most playful cub, George decides she would be the perfect companion for his barren wife.

After raising Elsa for until adulthood things inevitably start to wrong as Elsa realizes life outside the household and nature’s urges steer her to realize her true calling. George and Joy are then faced with a difficult decision: to send Elsa to the zoo, where will live out her days in a cage but the receive the care she is used to, or to attempt to teach Elsa how to fend for herself in the wild where she can live free, but face the agony not knowing whether she was well equipped enough to survive.

The movie in many ways paralleled the purpose of the creation of Sadhana Forest and their efforts at reviving the forest. Sadhana Forest was initiallyh created in 2003 as an initiative to revive severely eroded land on the outskirts of Auroville and recreate and indigenous Dry Evergreen Forest.

The movie in many ways paralleled the purpose of the creation of Sadhana Forest and their efforts at reviving the forest. Sadhana Forest was initiallyh created in 2003 as an initiative to revive severely eroded land on the outskirts of Auroville and recreate and indigenous Dry Evergreen Forest.

The dilemma raised in the movie is a question I walked away with as the bus pulled away from the hippy go green community. Can what man has interfered with ever be restored to its original state? Apparantly the inhabitants of Sadhana Forest have often had to learn the hard way, standing by as indigenous trees have died in front of their eyes, not being able to survive the climate and competition with other species. What then, is the solution?

For the 1000 or so residents of Sadhana is in living our lives in accordance with nature. Everything they do reflects this principle including building eco-friendly homes from bamboo, using compost toilets, minimizing waste of water (only 50 litres of water per person is used a day), eating vegan cuisine, and using ash and vinegar to clean dirty utensils, all in an effort to minimize harm to the environment. Can this lifestyle catch on, as like in Auroville, people get tired of their mundane lives and seek a different lifestyle in the Forest of Sadhana? Can humanity move from following the trendy bio lifestyle to leading lives that function in accordance with the biology of the Earth?

This is a question for serious meditation, and I look forward to doing just that at the much publicized night of Tibetan Meditation taking place at at the Tibetan Pavilion on the day of the full moon. Perhaps, if I am lucky, I may I may get an audience with the famous Man in the moon.

by Puxan
SDP Practicum 2009/10 // Media coordinator 2011/12

This year marks my third consecutive participation in the AUP Sustainable Development Practicum in Auroville. With each new practicum comes a different set of ideas, perceptions and experiences to the city of Dawn. While the energy and contribution of the AUP group differ from year to year, all contribute to building a unique relationship between the American University of Paris and the universal township of Paris. In my opinion, the biggest similarity between AUP and Auroville resides in finding unity out of diversity.

AUP Green launched an initiative of more conscious living in 2010 by outlining crucial checkpoints in an attempt to make AUP’s urban campus more sustainable and environmentally aware. Closer ties between AUP and Auroville grew out of the Practicum. Each year, AUP students offset their carbon emission by planting trees in the Green Belt of Auroville at Lumière with Martanda and Catherine (ex-AUP student).

As we headed out to the forest last week (pre-Cyclone), we came across trees planted by the previous practica.

Tree planted by SDP Practicum 2008/09.

Tree planted by SDP Practicum 2009/10.

Here is a look at this year’s SDP Practicum 2011/12 tree planting:

by Laura Collier

Sustainability is not communism. It does not mean that everyone should have the same things, nor does it mean renouncing all of your worldly possessions and living in a hut. I have found myself struggling with this a bit during my time in Auroville. The surrounding villages and many parts of Pondicherry, especially after the recent cyclone, are impoverished, and life there can be very difficult. My experience in Auroville has been extremely pleasant, despite setbacks with power and water shortages as well as damage to trees and structures because of the storm. I’ve been well-fed, housed and taken care of. Is it inconsistent with the notion of sustainability if I eat an ice cream at the Visitor’s Center while I am working on a project to help a local NGO, which hopefully will have a positive effect on Auroville and the surrounding communities? Perhaps. But it is not inconsistent because I am eating ice cream and there are some people in the world, or even in Auroville, who cannot afford ice cream. It may be inconsistent with sustainability because I am eating too much ice cream or because of the costs, be they economic or environmental, to supply the cafe. But it is not a problem to have ice cream simply because there are people in the world who cannot have it.

The idea of living sustainably is partly to serve as a model for how others can or should live. Though I was assured by Sacha, one of our program coordinators, that “you don’t have to be Buddha,” or give up your entire life to serve others, living sustainably calls you to lead a life that can be a model for others in the world. The lifestyle should be one that generally, if adopted by others, would have a positive effect. It calls for sharing and conserving resources, being mindful of how you interact with the environment and consciously trying to give back to the world, your family, friends, neighbors and community on a local, national and/or international scale.

There must, however, be a question of how much inequality is acceptable in the concept sustainable living. Having a fortune that would be difficult to spend even in two lifetimes while people are dying from hunger in the streets, doesn’t fit into a sustainable living model. I would assert that everyone has the responsibility to give of their extra resources to ensure that the basic needs of others are met. The controversial part of this assertion comes in defining basic needs. Are they just clean water, food, and a place to live? How much water, food, living space? What type? Do we just cover the basics of human rights? There is a lot to interpret.

It is in search of this balance that Auroville’s experiment is interesting and important. One can dive into contemplating these issues and then go beyond and try to live them, not just on a personal scale, but in a community. I can say personally that I don’t think I’ve found my balance, but my eyes are opening to new ways to try. I may need to start by having less ice cream…or at least sharing more of it.

by Sorana Ionascu

People often say there is a huge dissonance between expectations and reality. Personally, I always thought of this as one of those clichés that make you cringe and you end up agreeing with only out of courtesy. India proved me wrong. About half-year ago, as I was drafting my application essay for the Practicum, I vividly remember including some thoughts along the lines of how this trip is going to change me forever. At the time, I was fully confident of the persuasive power my declaration would have on those who read it, but I only half-heartedly believed in the statement itself. In my case, I tried to limit pre-departure research because I wanted to live this experience on my own, unmediated by other people’s interpretations. India and especially Auroville was surrounded by an aura of mystery, best defined by “well it’s going to be different”. Still, I was not convinced that I would go through any life-changing process. Coming from Eastern Europe, pretty much anywhere I go in the world is an encounter with a different culture, so up until I arrived on Indian soil I was not expecting much more than an intense culture-shock.

I could not have been further away from the truth. In the past weeks, I was overwhelmed by the learning process that grabbed me and has not yet let go. India, especially Auroville, truly teaches me something new every day. And it is not only theoretical information; it is mostly valuable knowledge about how to live in harmony with nature and build a relationship based on respect. As the Earth’s resources are depleting, people here are trying to find tangible solutions to the problem and incorporate them into their everyday lives. Be it solar panels, composting toilets, recycling or planting trees, Aurovillians are constantly fighting to diminish their negative impact on the land. The first few days in India were an exercise in learning how to reconnect with nature. But it was not as easy as it sounds, as there was a lot of adapting involved. You are put in a situation where you have to forget the lifestyle you had back home. But it is not just slightly altering your behavior. You have to be willing to learn how to put the interest of the community before your own concepts of comfort. And trust me, it is not easy at first, but it sort of grows on you.

While I was barely getting used to this new approach to life, Cyclone Thane came by and left us with complete devastation. Looking at the bigger picture, this catastrophe taught us an important lesson in modesty. The lack of water and electricity combined with the witnessing of the destruction in the region is almost too much to explain in words. The first thing that comes to mind is gratitude that we are still alive and unharmed. The emotion that follows the appreciation is a sense of guilt, which leads to an encouragement of giving as much as we can to the community through our work on projects.

Every day I wake up with the impression that I am still dreaming. Half of the time I am overwhelmed by everything that is going on around me. Auroville is a constant learning experience that I will never forget. The culture-shock is indeed present, but it slowly becomes a minor element in the background of a lesson on adaptation and an attempt at understanding. While trying to arrange the confusion currently going on in my head, I stumbled upon a quote from Sri Aurobindo, Auroville’s main spiritual figure: “what the soul sees and has experienced, that it knows; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion”. With that in mind, I leave you dear reader to draw your own conclusions.