Issue No: 351, October 2018
Mother's foot soldier
Prasad joined Auroville in 1989. He has taught in New Creation School, worked on the Matrimandir and at present manages the construction unit aurOMira which is involved in the completion of the Sunship and Kalpana projects.
Auroville Today: How did you first come across Mother and Sri Aurobindo?
Prasad: I came across Sri Aurobindo because my brother Charles had read Sri Aurobindo’s books and told me about him and the Mother. He gave me some books of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. At the time I was only familiar with Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna. I looked at one of these books, it was the compilation What is Mind?, then threw it aside.
However, that night I saw Sri Aurobindo in my dream, so I took up that book again and started reading. And that was it; I never stopped. My brother gave me the rest of the books that were with him, then I went to the town library. There I found a cupboard in a cobwebbed corner that was full of Sri Aurobindo’s literature.
I was learning to meditate. So I would go to a playground at night and sit in meditation. We were living in Kerala, and these curious people would come and sit next to me and ask me what I was doing. I explained and told them what I was reading and they became interested. So we created a study circle and then, later, a sports circle, women’s circle and an educational circle where we taught English. None of us had any money, so we would get up at 3 o’clock in the morning to work in a coconut factory to finance these activities.
I became a member of the Sri Aurobindo Society. One day the postman delivered the Society magazine and at the back, there was an announcement that on 8.8.88, there would be a special Darshan at the Ashram. At once I had the feeling that a call was coming to me.
I came to the Ashram and stayed in a guest house but then ran out of money. I didn’t want to go away; I wanted to stay until the Darshan day. So I went to Vijay Poddar and told him I wanted to join the Ashram. He said he knew my family situation as we had already been in touch, and asked, ‘Why don’t you join the Sri Aurobindo Society so that we can support you financially?’. I told him again that I wanted to join the Ashram.
So he wrote a chit to Ravindraji about me. Ravindraji asked me why I wanted to join the Ashram. On the desk in the room where we met there was a small photo of The Mother. I looked at it and had the cheek to say that She was asking me to join the Ashram. He laughed and told me that they were looking for somebody to work on Cazanove Farm, which I think is one of the first farms bought by the Ashram. So I went there. I was accepted into the Ashram in 1988.
I had a great time while I was in the Ashram. I used to have wonderful conversations with Niroda in his room near the Samadhi. Then Nolinida’s hundredth birthday was approaching, and as his samadhi was at Cazanove we started making preparations to receive Champaklal and Niroda there. While I was cleaning up the place, I found a treasure: two photographs of Mother and Sri Aurobindo signed by them on Her birthday, Darshan day, 21st February 1933.
I asked Niroda if he would come to my room and invoke the Presence and Blessings of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo there. He came. While he was there he remarked ‘Look, we seniors are all leaving. It is up to you, the young generation, to take over and continue the work.’
However, I left the Ashram because there were certain rules I could not follow. I decided to come to Auroville. I went to the Visitors Centre and said that I wanted to join Auroville and was looking for some work that I could do. I told them that I could teach, among other things. They advised me to see Andre at New Creation. He was very welcoming and I began teaching there.
But after a couple of years you became involved with constructing Vikas community. How did that happen?
I was living in Aspiration. Satprem, who was also a resident, was upset at the way things were running there. He felt that we needed to create our own community. So Satprem, Kalyani and myself started the Vikas project. At first, we didn’t know what to call it, but one night when I was on night duty at Matrimandir this name came floating down like a feather. ‘Vikas’ means ‘expansion’, and this has always been a trait that appealed to me. In fact, my childhood hero was Alexander the Great who conquered the world horizontally. Sri Aurobindo did the same thing vertically!
So we started this project and I was the site supervisor. I had no prior experience of construction work – I had studied for a B.Sc. in which my major was maths and minor was physics. However, I had some training in people management because at Cazanove Farm I was in charge of 30-40 workers. But the fact that I could speak Tamil was the biggest advantage I had in working with the construction workers.
Meanwhile, I had begun working at Matrimandir, helping construct the catwalk and stairs that led to the roof.
Then I met a German girl: we fell in love but when she left I began thinking of going to Europe.
What was the attraction of the West?
I wanted to understand the West and why India and the West seem to have difficulty in working together. Also, when I was teaching in New Creation I felt I could not continue teaching unless I had a broader life experience.
Then I got the opportunity to go to Australia with an American lady. I had no financial means, so she said I could earn money there and afterwards travel to Europe. I was not sure whether I should go or not. When an older lady from the Ashram offered me relics of Mother’s hair, that was a clear indication for me that the Mother was giving me Her Sanction and Protection.
I found Australia so welcoming. When I was working at Matrimandir, I was looked down on as an economic migrant: I was just another worker and didn’t feel recognised as part of the team. But when I arrived at the airport in Australia a police officer walked up to me saying, ‘Welcome to Australia, sir.’ That was amazing. And then we went to live in a beautiful place called Cairns in Queensland, where there are two world heritage sites: The Rain Forest and the Great Barrier Reef, side-by-side.
Later I went to West Australia where I graduated from the University of Perth with a degree in film and television. But there is no film industry there, so a friend suggested I become a teacher. I did a one year course in education, during which I decided I wanted to teach aborigines.
Why?
I felt that Australia belongs to the aborigines. We are the guests, and I felt that since I was leading such a great life in Australia I wanted to do something for the indigenous people who gave me this opportunity.
I got a job in a remote school in Kimberley District Western Australia. The Principal asked me to teach maths and computer studies. As I’m Indian he immediately assumed that I would be good at these things!
The aboriginal elders wanted to meet the new teachers. Inherently they don’t trust non-aboriginal people because even as late as 1970 the white Australians were shooting aboriginal people for fun. I put together a slideshow where I mixed photographs of Indian Adivasis and aboriginal people. Then I asked them to tell me who was who. They couldn’t, and immediately they recognised that as an Indian I was part of their tribe. In fact, they gave me the honour of making me a tribal member.
I wrote a letter to one of the successful aboriginal corporations, offering to teach the students by creating multimedia classrooms with smartboard, laptops with wifi connection, data projector and surround sound system and online-based curriculum. In 2004 this kind of technology was only entering rich private schools in the cities. The problem is that the aboriginal people come and go: you never know who will be in your class next week. I found that the best solution was the individual lesson plan. I created a programme where students could come in at any time and try a certain level, and if it was too difficult they could easily go down a step until they found the right place to start.
The corporation gave me Aus $10,000 to set up a prototype classroom. Within two years, with additional funding from the Education Department of Western Australia, the entire school was converted into a smart classroom. I can confidently could say that it turned out to be one of the most IT- enhanced remote aboriginal schools in Australia.
In Australia, I met Tomoko from Japan, who became my life partner. When I returned to Auroville after 18 years with Tomoko and two children we didn’t have anywhere to live, so I asked an Aurovilian architect to help me finish a house in Surrender that had originally been intended for Prema. As the house under construction took longer than anticipated we went back to Australia.
When you returned to Auroville did you feel a different person from the one who had left many years before?
I remember talking to Otto at Financial Service after I came back and he said ‘You are different now’. I understood that I was not the same person, that there had been a fundamental change in me. I had left in some disappointment because I had not felt part of this place, but now I felt I couldn’t just blame the community for that: it was also something to do with me. At that time my consciousness had not yet developed, not evolved enough. But now I had the necessary qualifications and profile that the community was looking for: I’m deeply connected with Sri Aurobindo and Mother, I can speak Tamil, I can understand the Western culture, and I had the experience of being CEO of an organisation in Australia. So when I came back, instead of being on the bottom rung of the ladder, I was sucked into the major working groups. I was asked to become Executive of the Road Service, then a member of the Land Board and BCC.
You also became involved once more in construction.
The unfinished house in Surrender we live in after coming back here is one of the reasons I got into construction. It is still unfinished, it has already cost 56 lakh rupees and is still leaking after several repair works.
When I returned, I felt that construction in Auroville can be modernised and be made less- labour intensive by introducing new machinery. We also need to create bigger construction companies to develop our in-house capacity in Auroville. I would like to see an Auroville Building Service that would bring all aspects of construction under one umbrella. That was my aim when I started the construction company Aurocreation, (now called aurOMira). We have heavy equipment, as well as masons, carpenters, plumbers, painters and metalworkers. We also have 4 civil engineers and site supervisors and we offer training and employment for about 50 people from the surrounding villages. They all work together which makes it easy for them to coordinate.
You also wanted to set up a central purchasing place and store for construction materials.
It didn’t work out at that time because I felt I didn’t get sufficient encouragement from the working group, but I still dream that it will happen one day. It sometimes seems as if, when Aurovilians join a working group, they lose all trust in their fellow-Aurovilians. This often seems to be blocking development, instead of encouraging it.
However, there is probably still some preparation I need to go through so that one day She will make me ready. I know I am imperfect, I have all possible weaknesses, but I want to be the Mother’s foot soldier. And I’m not afraid to fall down and get up again.
In Australia, you worked with the aborigines in order to help empower them. Are you trying to do the same thing with your Tamil workers here?
Yes. My involvement in the daily running of my construction company is minimal. I don’t micromanage because I want to encourage my workers to become leaders.
Unfortunately, there is discrimination in Auroville. It is mostly unconscious but the reason I resigned from the Land Board was that some of the Indian members were treating the Tamil workers like inferiors and I didn’t want to be associated with that. Of course, you have to look at both sides of the spectrum: some Tamil people have swindled money and have tarnished their own culture. But I’ve got to know many Tamil people both inside and outside Auroville who are so genuine, so good. The Tamil people have a great culture. Unfortunately, many of them are poor. I believe that by giving them the opportunity to achieve their basic needs and a decent life the people of Tamil Nadu will be able to come back to their past glories and gain the appreciation they deserve.
Recently, I asked Shraddhavan if we could bring our aurOMira workers to Savitri Bhavan for a question and answer session about Auroville with Dhanalakshmi and Varadharajan. The idea was to help them understand better what we are trying to do here in Auroville and feel interested to be part of this adventure. She immediately welcomed us and there was a very good response from the workers, so now we have a weekly study session there. Then I thought, why don’t we sing Bande Mataram together? Because Sri Aurobindo said this is the mantra that liberated India. I felt we needed to invoke this mantra again for more liberation, especially for the people of this land.
You also have an idea to start a new community.
This new direction in my life came last year when I stayed in Golconde for some months. While I was there, I realised that being in a nuclear family is beautiful, but I also felt this limited family structure is no longer really appropriate here in Auroville: it doesn’t serve the aims of Auroville. I felt that I can do much more for Auroville by working with some like-minded people in a collective project.
The name of our proposed community is ‘Faith’. We don’t have a place yet, but whatever land we are given, we will respect the guidelines: if it’s farmland we will do farming, if it is forest, we will do forestry.
We are a group of very interesting people who are already inspiring each other. We get up early in the morning to collect seeds of the Palmyra tree and plan to plant them around the International Zone as a border. We also want to have a gift economy, so we are doing research into this and making healthy food for which people can make an offering towards land purchase.
Spiritually, the primary focus of this community is to find the psychic being, and we want to combine this with a collective life. Patricia, one of our members, said what we should be doing in Auroville is creating a gnostic society. This really captured my imagination.
But spirituality must include all aspects of life. In this context, there is a quotation from The Supramental Manifestation which has become the template for all my activities in Auroville. Sri Aurobindo writes that: an outer activity as well as an inner change is necessary. And it must be at once spiritual, cultural, educational, social and economical action.
So whatever we do in Auroville should have all these five elements – spiritual, cultural, educational, social and economic action. Often, we fail in this: we do educational research but the spiritual element is missing, or we do interesting cultural things but we don’t want to deal with the money aspect. I feel it is time to replace in Auroville the commercial model of the West by reviving the communal model of India.
Ultimately, if something is to manifest successfully in Auroville it has to have some kind of relationship to the supramental manifestation, otherwise, it will fall apart.
In Savitri there are these magnificent lines:
A prayer, a master act, a king idea
Can link man’s strength to a transcendent Force.
In Auroville, we need to have that intense prayer so that we will be able to receive the ‘king idea’ which Mother has shared with us in her Dream and the Charter, so that it can be expressed in living action. For me, this is the key.
From an interview by Alan
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