Ederlezi

Heal the soil

26 Apr 2013 | Kottakarai, Tamil Nadu, India

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I finally end up at Sapney farm. Sapney farm is the home of a project -called heal the soil- which aims at developping organic home food growing in Indian villages. It is located in Kottakarai village, next to Auroville, but it is not part of the Auroville project. There I meet lot of people with different background and stories, I take part of the work, help in the village and learn a lot of different things. And also I can discover Auroville.

Auroville is some kind of an utopia. It aims at being a laboratory of the human development. It was created in 1968, at a place where it was only sand and dust and is now an area with plenty of experimental project, mainly around food growing and personal development. It works as an anarchist group of communities -usually called settlement- which try to cooperate together to grow in harmony.
It counts 2300 inhabitants (but aims at 50000), of which 40% are Indians, and French and Germans being a big part also; there are also between 1000 and 2000 volunteers helping at the various projects, and it employs around 5000 people from the villages around which are usually pay the minimum wage (a few dollars per day).

In the 10 days I spend there, it is hard to make an opinion for myself. Sometime it looks to me like a nice place to live, full of interesting people with lots of ideas. But some other times I feel like it is an european settlement which uses cheap India to have an easy life...
As Martin says, you have to live with your contradictions, it is hard for everything to be perfect and to follow all of your principles. So for sure I will go back there sometime, for a much longer time to try to have a much deeper understanding of that place and learn from the people there.