My experience of Satprem

Walking on with Auroville

Soon I had to make my official request to the Auroville Committee to be granted formal permission to stay in Auroville and the necessary guarantee for my residential visa. And so I presented myself before the Committee, which was then composed of Navajata, Prem Mallik, Roger A. and, I think, Shyamsundar.

And I was refused.

I do not think I was offered any explanation, or that I even asked for one.

It was evidently the same antagonism at work.

But the choice within me was made. I knew that I would be serving the Matrimandir; I knew also that I would be living at the place named “Sincerity” by Mother, some two hundred meters away from the Matrimandir and the Banyan tree. At the time Shyamsundar was, through a sort of compromise with Navajata whose views he did not always share, responsible for the construction of the Matrimandir as administrator – Piero was responsible as engineer on site directing the work -, and he had given me a trusting and welcoming support; later he even called on André, the Mother’s son, to help formalize this support. The disagreement between Shyamsundar and Navajata was symptomatic of the crisis we would soon, all of us and from all sides, have to go through. In Mother’s physical absence, in the practical impossibility to lay before Her all the kinds of questions which were forming day by day, the distance between the varying perspectives only increased, diverging views were aggravated and positions hardened. All sorts of controversy began to covet the front of the stage.

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