Category: Auroville

Texts about Auroville as a place, a way of life, a community experiment, daily life and a space for experience in South India.

Dancing with the wind - Gilles Grimaître plays Avant-garde at CRIPA in Auroville

Gilles Grimaître visits Auroville for a few days during his Pro Helvetia artist residency in Bengaluru, Chennai, and Pondicherry to engage with Carnatic music. The program he chose for the evening of December 17th, 2022, was a passionate, loving introduction to usually not-so-accessible Western avant-garde music. Grimaître started off with Johannes Brahms's Drei Intermezzi op 117, a romantic crowd-pleaser, followed by a more challenging piece by Olli Mustonen (*1967) called ‘Jehkin Iivana’. Nobody would know the…

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Raga Dagar Auroville

Dhrupad

They were four magical days. The Auroville Film Institute organized a residency with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar from November 7th to 10th, 2022. It took place in the Bhumika Hall, Bharat Nivas Auroville. Dhrupad – The Film (1983). Ustad Bahauddin Dagar is a Rudraveena player. His family has been playing the instrument for 20 generations! His father and uncle (Zia Mohiyuddin Dagar and Fariduddin Dagar) were true masters. There is also the wonderful film Dhrupad by the Indian director Mani Kaul. Mani Kaul…

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Roots - Edible

The Solitude Farm in Auroville is a ‚food forest.‘ This is one of the few English terms that is difficult to express with a compound word in German (Esswald?). We don't have anything like it, and it's difficult for us to think about it. An orchard that we would let become overgrown with other edible annual and shorter-lived plants until we have a dense jungle of edible plants... I'm looking for a word for this. It's the opposite of a ‚food desert,‘ for which we also have...

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OM Choir

Today I was in a choir lesson. What happened there was a very intense shared experience. I'll try to describe it as objectively as possible. We (about 60 participants) started with breathing exercises, ‚warmed up‘ our vocal cords, sang four-part chords, and scaled the pitch. The choirmaster pointed out that we weren't here by chance. He said we were in Auroville because something had drawn us here. I think most people in the room understood what he meant, for others perhaps...

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Meditation notes - 6.10.22 Matrimandir

Today, I finally went to the Matrimandir for the first time. Six years ago, I had a guided tour, which is a prerequisite for going alone later. It also makes sense to have a general idea of what kind of place it is, how to behave there, and what would disturb others. During my Monday meditations in Zen-Kreis Bremen, I was often drawn here. It was a place of peace and strength. Sometimes it seemed as if it wanted to tell me something. Well, it has...

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Blossom

Center guest house

Many films feature good hotels that are centrally located and where the political, intellectual, and economic elite gather. I've always perceived this as something very elitist, colonial, and power-hungry. What I missed in the films, and what was probably rarely addressed there, is the networking that takes place in such places. Now, the Center Guesthouse in Auroville is hardly comparable to a luxury hotel in a metropolis, although it is a very beautiful place that invites...

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