Happy to share with a few students a new trip to Auroville for Asian Strategy Consulting Project, a partnership with ESSEC Asia Pacific and Capgemini Invent.
I was lucky to meet Manoj Das Gupta who is the “head” of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 85. Very close to The Mother he is also in charge of Sri Aurobindo International Education. We had a very interesting conversation about this amazing school with no exams, no grades or evaluation. For the very first time one year ago we welcomed one of this school’s student at ESSEC (his first exam was the GMAT).
His father is on the right side. Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, an integral part of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, serves as a field for experiment and research in education. For years Sri Aurobindo has considered the formation of a new system of education as one of the best means of preparing the future humanity to manifest upon earth a divine consciousness and a divine life. To give a concrete shape to his vision, the Mother opened a school for children on December 2, 1943.
After a third stay in Auroville and despite the many meetings, I keep having more questions about what is a real aurovillian? Are people contributing or benefiting from it? Is it behaving as one even outside the community? Are they following the teachings of Mother and Aurobindo? Are they developing one's spirituality or are they looking for new ways of life? There are so many initiatives and ideas, constructions to develop new worlds bringing however many paradoxes in this small city of 3000 people. Nevertheless, they are pioneers, it is an experiment like no other, that must inspire ourselves. Since the Greeks and especially Socrates we’ve come to realize that the search for spirituality, has never taken away mundane life. So let’s be inspired by this community’s initiatives, and consider Auroville as a spiritual exercise so as to bring back the meaning of the banality of everyday life, just as Thoreau wanted to bring back his Walden.
