There is one thing that I cannot stress enough, as it seems to not be able to break through the wall of propaganda and virtue signalling that is being put up here (the parallels with what is happening in the world are staggering). I t is insane to call someone out for being violent if you leave them no other option but to physically intervene in order to stop you from robbing them. That IS the reality of Auroville. There is a decades-long culture of acute self-centeredness, selfishness and tribalism, a culture of abuse, of anti-Auroville development, and the ONLY way to be able to change that and make it stop, to have Auroville develop in the way the Mother intended, is to physically interfere. That is not a crime, because that is then the only option to STOP a crime.
So the Auroville Foundation Office, the Secretary and the Governing Board, are NOT the aggressors here. They are the ones who defend themselves from being aggressively abused. This is clear from the facts, and it will be easily demonstrable in court.
The very sorry state of affairs, the failure to create anything the Mother had asked for, is clear for all to see. However, 5 decades of endless propaganda have created a “reality” in which certain things are taken for gospel truth WITHOUT ANY PROOF. Many of these things also cannot really be proven. How do you prove that your children are so broad-minded, so special, so intelligent or socially “wise”? The ONLY way to prove it is by showing how they create a better society, which so far has not happened here at all: the extremely ordinary and sorry state of Auroville is there for all to see, if one is still willing and able to look beyond the conditioning of the narratives.
The Aurovillagers are very well aware of this. They have nothing else to save them except the carefully cultivated narratives, which they cherish and now pump out ad nauseam. In the background, they are desperately trying to get some “facts” that can back up the claims. They don't really have any, and therefore need to prop up quickly fabricated meaningless things, and then promote these as great facts to make them LOOK a lot better than they actually are.
Lists are being made of “Auroville's achievements”. They may look impressive if you take them at face value, but when any other place in the world would create the same list of what was achieved over 3-4 decades, the Aurovillage “achievements” would shrink to the ridiculous excuse they in fact are.
They are trying to get through a lot of Residents' Assembly Decisions (RADs), several pending for years, even up to 10 years, to get up to date with the narrative that we have a “unique organisational structure”. The “SOS Auroville/Stand with Auroville unity” campaign actually uses these words as something special that needs to be “saved” from some barbaric onslaught. Read the text in the picture and see they claims they themselves make: we need to save their spiritual beliefs (the cult) and its power structures (our unique organisational structures and community processes). Nobody has the right to look into or question these things, you have to believe the Aurovillagers on their word when they tell you they're special and important! This gaslighting campaign is fully manufactured and sponsored by the Aurovillagers in order to create a semblance of huge international sympathy by having totally ignorant good-willing people worldwide “support” their outright lie that “the government is bulldozing a forest in Auroville”. It is a desperate attempt of the cult to save whatever they can of their image and power.
In reality, these words are a cover for a very ordinary, feudal rule-by-nepotism-and-cronyism. There is NOTHING democratic about it, as we saw in episode 18: if 6% of the population is enough to impose their will on the 94% others, “democracy” has been turned into feudal aristocratic rule. And that's without considering that we are not here to do some form of democracy. We are here to be lead by our highest and noblest aspirations, our understanding of the fundamental equal value of EVERY single human being, and not by our lowest cravings dressed up in beautiful spiritual words.
By the way, the list of RAD's is the “hot topic” that I spoke of at the beginning of episode 26. That was a totally wrong way of describing it. There's nothing “hot” about this topic: it's a lukewarm, stupid frenzy to remove the Aurovilians in “positions of power” who are in agreement with the assessments, decisions and actions of the Secretary and the Governing Board.
The Government is defending its sudden interference in Auroville's so-called “internal” matters by claiming that Auroville is at a present a failure. As you may have understood by now, they are not the only ones having noticed that point. From the perspective of building the city that was to be here BEFORE the Aurovilians arrived, from the perspective of growing in consciousness, from the perspective of actually REALISING something tangible as “Auroville”, it is indeed a failure: Auroville as it stands today is Aurovillage: a place where hardly anything moves, BY DESIGN: a small minority has hijacked the project for their own benefit from the very start, and has created the cult narrative that it actually is GOOD and NEEDED to have it this way. Aurovillage attracts loads of people who are not interested one bit in yoga or the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.
Already when I came, twelve years ago, people were shouting in meetings that they didn't give a damn about the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, and the endless repetitions of the “need to take the present realities into account” were only meant to perpetuate a reality that has no interest in growing into anything. It only wants to be some fiefdom, with a few overlords and a lot of enthusiastic eco-warriors who take the overlords' words as Divine Guidance. In the present global set-up, being part of the next hype is what matters, instead of thinking for yourself and understanding what actually goes on. Cui bono (“whom does this benefit”), the most simple and logical question to make sense of ANYTHING on this planet, has become a suspect quote, and a sign of “being a conspiracy theorist”, instead of the sign of having a functioning brain and some common sense. The meteoric rise to media-stardom of Greta Thunberg was not suspicious at all, and copy/pasting her actions and words without questioning anything is considered good, smart and in fact needed to be accepted in our global society. In such an environment, the talk here about “cutting trees” and “violence” used against sweet innocent Aurovilians is immediately plugged into a carefully crafted hyper-emotional framework that passes judgement as a knee-jerk reaction, as a trained dog: “eco good, government bad”. The reality of what the situation here actually is, is not relevant apparently, no background-information is needed, no closer look: identity is all, a few check-marks do the rest.
But unfortunately for the Aurovillagers, the insistence of the government on the fact that Auroville is not going according to plan and thus a failure, has suddenly shone a huge beam of light on what the Aurovillage “unique organisational structures” really are.
Obviously, as already stated, the Aurovillage propaganda mill has immediately started to churn out all kinds of claims that Auroville has achieved loads of stuff and is oh so special and totally right on track. Because in reality, there is nothing to show for that claim, the Foundation is now asking for some proofs of what those “unique organisational structures” then entail in terms of serious governance and neutral, objective processes. The Aurovillagers have nothing to say except “we simply make sure that we and our friends and family benefit from whatever happens here”. So the answers will be very interesting boring actually, as they cannot state the truth; they can only write something that says nothing and avoids answering the question. Which obviously will be pierced like the balloon it is by the Foundation Office. There's the next Governing Board meeting in April, we can anticipate some seriously displeased/angered/crying Aurovillagers coming out of the room after being held accountable for their pretend governance for the first time in their life. If I may quote myself: “oh, the insult to their soul!”
By the way, from the reactions and angry looks I receive here, I can only deduct that my writing has way more power than I ever held imaginable. It seems they now hold ME accountable for the whole situation, as if it's MY fault that they abused Auroville for personal profit all these years. You want some more proof of their insanity? Here you go:
So they lay claim to having “unique” but “democratic” processes to create “governance” of Auroville. As with about everything in Auroville, words don't mean here what they mean somewhere else. In democracies all over the world, the party that gets the majority of the votes gets to decide for the coming years. Here in Auroville, democracy means that you agree with whatever the cult has decided. Whether they are the majority or the minority, nobody cares: you listen when the cult speaks. So at this moment, we have in the FAMC 2 members (not accidentally both foreigners) who refuse to accept the legal power of the Governing Board, and 6 members who simply trod along on the war path the two very vocal Aurovillagers have decided to take the whole FAMC ( which not accidentally has only 2 Indians out of 8 members.) In the Auroville Council (a euphemism for the “Auroville Court of Internal Settlements”), only 3 Aurovillagers (not accidentally all three foreigners) decide what is being said and done, and the 5 other members (not accidentally all five Indians), simply nod and shut up. This is “democracy” in Auroville.
But it gets worse. In the Working Committee, the unthinkable happened: 4 members openly endorsed the Secretary and the Governing Board's overhaul of Aurovillage. You can imagine how deeply insulted the Aurovillagers are with such a situation. There are – oh astronomical disgrace – only THREE other members, who are Aurovillagers, and thus the minority. As we have seen, that should in “normal” circumstances not matter: nobody is supposed to stand up against the Aurovillagers in “working groups”. But here, the 4 courageously stood up and declared that they would not be intimidated: they were the majority and hence would take decisions. The soap circus that ensued is already a delight since months. Suddenly, “democracy” was not really important anymore, and the fact that people stand up against the cult is openly “outed” and labelled “dysfunctionality”. Meaning: our feudal cult rule is now not functioning as planned anymore, thus it needs “repairing”. The three Aurovillagers – including our famous Hemant Lamba with high connections in Delhi, whom he visited while “being sick with covid” (how on earth was he able to fly? how did he not start a new deadly wave in Delhi? – oh, because he wasn't sick at all and had blatantly lied to his colleagues in order to explain his absence, just as he lied about 150.000 trees to still be cut in order to have the Crown Road paved) –, those three mouseketeers have been loudly proclaiming their dissent with the “rogue” majority. The fact that they are the majority and selected by “due process” (another lame euphemism for the feudal state of affairs) had suddenly lost all its value, and they were now put on public display as defectors who are betraying the trust of the “Aurovilians” who they are supposed to represent. The fact that they actually DO represent a vast part of the residents is ignored, because in Aurovillage ONLY the people who agree with the cult narrative are Aurovilians – the rest is quantité négligeable and only matters when it's useful to have some figures in propaganda output. The behaviour of the thrummy three comes down to shameless harassment of the feisty four, which is obviously not a funny situation on a daily basis, but it was not able to do any damage: stuff is moving on according to plan. So what was the last offensive of the 3 poor sods? You will never guess. They found nothing better than to claim that due to THEIR disagreement with the majority in the group, (which in Aurovillage terms is non-obedience of the 4 members to the dictates of the cult), the WHOLE Working Committee had become dysfunctional, and so ALL 7 members needed to resign. You know, just like anywhere in the world, when the opposition parties get fed up with not being able to pass laws through parliament, they declare the whole democratic set-up to be dysfunctional, and call for all MPs to resign and decree that new elections need to be held. Over and over until they actually get a majority and can rule. Right?
So that wasn't happening, even though they asked their big brother, the Auroville Council, to play along and endorse their “democratic due process”. Instead of this nonsense, we now get the next level of Auroville debility: the Aurovillagers will have an “RAD” to “impeach” the 4 heretics and replace them with cult members. Through “due process”! That “due process” is in itself too absurd to be credible of course: they now will have “decision making processes” to make sure that the present unforeseen backlash of their “democratic unique governance structures” is “democratically” overturned and their “power” to dictate what Aurovilians are allowed to think and say restored to them. The fact that they have to totally invalidate their claim to any rational and useful process and show their true anti-democratic colours is an unfortunate side-effect that they try to cover with hysterical screams about emotional, ecological and political victimhood. Because oh, they are soooo NOT against development here!
I congratulate you if you have read until the end without pulling out some hair or crying out in disbelief. Yes, I am sarcastic and yes, I am blunt (because this toxic narrative needs to be cut out of Auroville once and for all, and that takes a lot of whacking through misplaced sympathy), but I am also factual. I don't invent any of this. I wouldn't know why and how to, to be honest. It's not needed: the reality of Aurovillage is a satirical sitcom all by itself. They want to make it seem like a tragedy, but their melodramatic soap-operatic hyper-emotional nonsense has to be dealt with in the proper way: ridiculed and discarded, to make space for something worthy of our time, energy and attention.
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