Green Acres

In this newsletter, we are happy to present details of the Master Plan land added to Auroville since the start of A4A – all thanks to your donations! In addition, we share articles that attest to the ongoing creativity and commitment of Aurovilians and friends: our A4A flier and LFAU letter share the vision that motivates our work; two articles featuring the contributions and life paths of longtime Aurovilians Uma Prajapati and Lalit Kishor Bhati; and the announcement of the new Art For Land exhibition at the Unity Pavilion – creativity in several media on a theme based on Sri Aurobindo’s works: ‘The Inner Awakening & The Outer Expression’. We finish with a text from Sri Aurobindo on the need for and difficulties of personal and collective transformation. Despite the many challenges of our times, A4A continues its commitment to consolidating and protecting Auroville’s land to ensure its viable future and provide the space for the manifestation of the City of Dawn!

The Acres for Auroville land campaign was launched on August 15, 2014 for raising funds to secure, consolidate, and protect the unified land base that The Mother envisaged for the City of Dawn. This collaborative unity action has inspired thousands of donations to address this most essential need – land for manifesting the Auroville dream! As we start Year 12, we are gratified to announce our positive results: thanks to you, 187.14 new consolidating acres have been added to Auroville to date in 21 strategic City areas, and 20 Greenbelt farms, forest zones, and nature preserves. In A4A Year 12, we continue our commitment to raising funds for the land needed to ensure the township’s viability and unified future, and to manifest Auroville’s futuristic and evolutionary goals. Each day, your donations bring us closer to success – click to see photos of some of the new land that your solidarity has enabled!

Uma arrived in Auroville in 1996 for a two-week project at Auromode. Those two weeks never ended and have become three decadesr! She came with the degree and technical skills of a trained fashion designer, but had no idea that fashion would become her yoga. After her work at Auromode, Uma founded Upasana design studio, which led her to the discoveries of business as yoga, ownership without ownership, bringing consciousness into fashion, and social projects such as the renowned Tsunamika. Seeing work as “worship”, Uma is now involved in collective tasks at Town Hall – anti-encroachment work at the Land Service and youth housing and Campus Management at the Housing Service. She says: “I am a joyful workaholic at the feet of the Divine Mother. I only ask, how can I serve?”

“Only a greater wholeness of being, knowledge, and power can unite life into something true and whole.” For Lalit, these words by Sri Aurobindo lit an inner fire, for a life of “wholeness” is his goal. A trained architect with a post-graduate degree in Urban Planning, Lalit did his internship with the legendary architect B.V. Doshi. Then, as part of the team preparing the urban master plan for 50,000 residents at ISKCON’s World Headquarters in West Bengal, he came to Auroville in 1997 as part of a professional study. In 1998, he was invited to join Aurofuture as a planning consultant and then L’Avenir as the urban planning coordinator. With his wife Shailaja and two children, he has built his life in Auroville. Part 1 of a two-part article shares his past 27 years of work in diverse aspects of Auroville’s collective life and development, which have shaped the path of his Integral Yoga quest. In his words, “Auroville is a Living Curriculum”.

Art for Land, along with the Unity Pavilion and Acres for Auroville, is pleased to announce its new exhibition “The Inner Awakening and the Outer Expression”. This theme is inspired by the Four Austerities as defined by Sri Aurobindo and the fifth vision of his “Five Dreams”: awakened individuals, a spiritualised society and the unification of humanity. These deep goals, integral to the founding of Auroville, have inspired the exhibition’s participating artists – working in various media and hailing from Auroville, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, France and Italy. Many of the works are available for purchase, whose proceeds go for Auroville land consolidation and protection via the A4A campaign. Since its start in 2016, Art for Land’s work has become recognized as a dynamic showcase for Auroville as a creative artistic hub. Ongoing till September 7th at the Unity Pavilion.

In this issue, we share an extract from Sri Aurobindo’s essay “The Chariot of Jagannatha” : “An ideal society is a vehicle of the Divine, the Divine as the inner soul of collective humanity. It is the Chariot of Jagannatha, the Lord of the World, and its four wheels are unity, freedom, knowledge and power. A society constructed by the mind or created by the impure vital agitations of Prakriti is not the Chariot of God … but the vehicle of that other many-faced god, the collective ego, which by concealing the free inner guide distorts the divine inspiration. … It is this ego which is the main barrier against divine perfection; this is as true of the collectivity as of the individual.

Your support since the start of the A4A campaign has enabled the addition of 187.14 new Master Plan acres, with 35.59 acres added just since 2022. A major goal is the missing protective plots near the Matrimandir – 11.81 acres have been acquired through your donations to date. The most recently purchased plot will house the new Reception Pavilion, but more land is needed for its full development. In this April 24th newsletter – the 105th anniversary of the Mother’s permanent arrival in India – we focus on the progress of the Matrimandir area, along with more stories of those who have contributed to building Auroville and its spirit. The newsletter summary also appears in French and Tamil: Version française en pdf … பிடிஎஃப்பில் தமிழ்ப் பதிப்பு

The Matrimandir, the heart and soul of Auroville, is a labor of love, built with the sustained and intensely devoted work of Aurovilians and so many friends, and is a source of inspiration too for the thousands of visitors to Auroville. The objective for the Matrimandir Team is to complete the rest of what The Mother had envisioned – all twelve gardens and the Lake – by February 21st 2028, the 150 birth anniversary of The Mother. Here we are happy to share how the Matrimandir Team is progressing on many fronts towards this great goal.

Aurovilian Giri has been involved with Auroville since his childhood, thanks to his father’s work, and aided in his life’s growth by Heidi and Patrick of Fertile East. Growing his skills step by step, he is a Web Developer and IT Support Person who has contributed at Aurelec, the Bamboo Center, Ness School, and at BlueLight and AV Web Services – his current two positions. Along with his wife Monica and his father Thirumal, he also produces food and milk for Auroville, and is a member of the Forest Group. Giri’s story is one of The Mother’s guiding hand and Grace.

“A House for the Third Millenium” published in 1986, is a series of essays by Aurovilian Ruud Lohman, who left his body just before its publication. Hailing from Holland, for 15 years Ruud was a member of the Franciscan religious order and for eight years, a Roman Catholic priest. In 1968 he was sent as a sociologist and missionary to India, where he sought out learning about the different forms of Yoga. This led him to coming to Pondicherry, and then arriving the next morning in Auroville on 21st February 1971. Ruud spent 15 and a half years of his dedicated life to the work of building the Matrimandir.