
And here we go. The insanity of the Aurovillage mentality is suddenly written down on a wall. Out in the open, for all to see.
The train-wreck is happening in front of our eyes, we only have to watch it happen. It's obvious that there will be more of these hiccups coming. It is inevitable.
Let me explain. The Aurovillagers have lost all of their power and their so carefully built-up fiefdoms. Their “lives”, their investments, their possessions. They were never supposed to have these things in Auroville in the first place, of course. Auroville is meant for people who DON'T want possessions and investments and fiefdoms. Auroville is meant for people who exactly want to get rid of all that old crap. But for whatever esoteric reason, they were allowed to create a total perversion of Mother's Dream here, on the very location She had chosen for it.
So they have all these material and emotional stakes that they lost since the new Secretary and Governing Board started taking stock and put the things back where they belong. Which is “in the hands of the Auroville Foundation”, instead of in the hands of some cult that claims to be “the RA of the Auroville Foundation” and with that claim somehow entitles itself to all material possessions of Auroville.
So that's now gone. Lost. Finished. What can they still do? If they DON'T do anything, they are goners: it's a done deal. But if they actually DO something, they have to reveal their true colours, and that's also suicide. Their true intentions and convictions are the total opposite of all the oceans of words they have written in all these years, and thus they are in a panic every time they actually need to DO something. It's a “damned if you do, damned if you don't” situation.
So they have put all their chips on court cases and a media campaign: they have created an emotional outcry that will somehow “do” things for them. The only thing THEY need to do is SAY stuff, which is already a dangerous affair, but at least, it's what they are good at and have done since the start: lying in public to garner sympathy.
Since a month or more, they are literally flooding Delhi with emails about how horrible the new Secretary is, how unfair it all is, how saintly they all are, how the Governing Board has the wrong end of the Foundation Act stick, how everything was going so utterly well in this little paradise, how everything now is the opposite of what Mother wanted, how toxic their beloved Aurovillage has suddenly become, how urgently the Secretary needs to be removed and everything undone: an endless avalanche of emotional blabber to simply sweep the MPs and the PM away from rationality and facts, and into sympathising with the devil.
They have no choice: they have nothing to lose anymore. They can only desperately and frantically try to convince people that reality is not what anybody sees for themselves, but is only what THEY SAY it is.
And then this. BOOM. Reality so much in everybody's face that all of their efforts over the past month are wiped out: the cannon went off next to the heads of all the MPs and the PM, and they are suddenly and violently snapped out of the beautiful hypnotism of the Aurovillagers, and catapulted back into the crude and nasty reality of Aurovillage itself.
You can imagine the panic this morning, when this graffiti was discovered. A total disaster for the so carefully crafted propaganda campaign.
For the foreigners reading this: you have to understand what the setting here in India of such a message is. This is not some silly graffiti under a bridge in Paris. It is not some totally ignored spraying of something nonsensical in the London underground. This is NOT an ordinary, totally insignificant expression of free speech in the West. This is a highly explosive political statement in a place that is under scrutiny for malfeasance, corruption and colonial attitudes, a place where foreigners are given extreme freedoms of self-governance, in a country that has not digested its colonial past. In a time in which on the contrary, the middle-class is severely struggling to get to grips with the fact that colonialism works with subservience, and that our present global society is very far from having eliminated its toxic roots that gave birth to colonialism in the first place. Many people in India are waking up to the reality that colonialism is now being expressed through economic dominance, and that the racist mentality that sprouted colonialism is still very much present in Western people. They are seeing the double standards that Westerners apply all the time, even in spite of their own goodwill. They are seriously not happy with the discovery that colonialism is still very much alive, just as is racism, and that they are STILL, in 2022, on the receiving end of this demeaning behaviour. I suppose I don't need to add the fact that India is presently governed by a nationalist party? In case this picture isn't clear enough, let me spell it out for you: this kind of behaviour, in this place and at this time is considered as good as a criminal act. It is ab-so-lu-tely NOT taken as a dumb joke. It is received as a strong kick in an already painful stomach.
Some time ago, Alain Bernard, the infamous Aurovillager-of-the-first-hour who proudly exposed all the scheming that went into the creation of the Auroville Foundation Act and the war against the Sri Aurobindo Society, argued in all seriousness that Auroville should have some totally independent city-state status, something like Vatican City or the City of London. Guess how well THAT went down here. The poor sod had to quickly retract it all. Such utterings show the world clearly what exactly goes on in these people's minds: they actually LIVE in this delusional reality in which they are king of something, in which a spiritual excuse is enough to justify very old and ordinary egoistic attitudes.
So yes, the Aurovillagers are of course in total panic, which forces them to react once again, which of course can only backfire: with every move they make, the noose around their necks is tightening more and more. They now are desperately trying to belittle this and ignore it as insignificant. Which obviously doesn't help. They have already repainted the wall white: a literal white-washing of reality! The Auroville Council of all groups rushed to the “rescue” and immediately ordered the wall to be covered and then painted over, to make sure this blatant exposé of Aurovillage's true colours was no longer visible. Salient detail: in three days the Governing Board meets again. In the building just next to this place. Wouldn't THAT have been a spectacle to behold for our respected governing members? In case they were still doubting whether it was really as bad here as I pretend, they could have witnessed it for themselves!
Now the question obviously remains: who put this slogan on the wall? An investigation might reveal that. Renu has already gone full “false flag!!” and claims it's a ploy to paint the Youth in a bad light. Her partner, Wazo, is the one who convinced the Youth Centre people to NOT follow through on their agreement with the Secretary, but to do nothing and let the JCB's come so they could make a big media drama out of it all. Seems that kind of scheming clearly fits more with them than with us. From the scribbly way it is written, it's most probably someone from the Aurovillage camp, seriously unhappy with the recent developments and the fact that they are losing their so precious “autonomy”, by which they have been able to create the toxic cult that Auroville was until now. Believe me, the sense of entitlement of the Aurovillagers is beyond belief. Until we have clear evidence to the contrary, it is the most logical conclusion that one of their cult members simply dialled up their zeal a notch too far, and was convinced this was going to be a big help. You see, the Aurovillagers have nothing else but emotional arguments. Nothing on the ground, no facts here can help them: there's nothing but total chaos and dysfunctionality to show. Don't take my word for it: come and look a bit closer at ANY aspect of Auroville, and you find corruption, diversion of funds, stealing, nepotism, cronyism, feudalism, cultism: one big melting pot of nasty profiteering and power games. I'm not exaggerating: it's really in every corner of Aurovillage, as that is what it has been based on for all these years. It's their so precious “spirit of Auroville”, a total distortion of the Spirit the Mother infused in this project. So their ONLY recourse is to have people disregard the facts, and to divert the attention to the emotional sob story of how horribly they are victims of injustice! Their main narrative is “The BJP government is bulldozing its nasty greedy way through our sacred Auroville Forest!! Oh blasphemy! Ecocide! Harmony and Unity in our Peaceful Township shattered by the BJP!” Guess what: some people here took the propaganda nonsense a bit too serious and got to really believe in it. They jumped on the bandwagon of the Holy War to SOS Save Auroville Unity campaign. They caught the fire of the spirit of Aurovillage, and now launch a call for the ridding of Auroville from the evil Indian Government! Independence for Auroville!! Nothing less will do! Tchakkaa! No prisoners taken! The full monty! Victory or inglorious death! When you have no other weapon but to whip up emotional outrage, you are obviously playing with fire: people might go overboard at any moment, that's the normal result when you push people to have strong emotional reactions. How to prevent this from happening? How to make sure people are outraged enough to become irrational, but not SO outraged that they become unhinged? It's simply not possible, it's the collateral damage of their war. Who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind.
So expect more of these “juvenile” “innocent” “unfortunate but harmless” car crashes from the Aurovillagers. When in panic mode, the brakes are off, so stuff gets messy easily. Late stage decline, collapse immanent. It's not a pretty sight. But there's no choice. It has to go. Auroville needs to get a chance to grow from a more mentally healthy root.
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