with Sri Ganesh

are of some semi-official type and I gather later that the senior most among them is a deputy Tahsildar with the Auroville Foundation and as such seems to report directly to the Secretary; as they enter I see that Subramanian is careful to avoid looking at me; only Mahalingam makes an effort at courtesy and informs me that, now that the Secretary “has given them permission to use the land on the other side of the road (where Murthy has his stone workshop), they have come to check the boundary stones inside the compound”… This hardly makes any sense: I have never seen any boundary stone inside the compound, and Auroville land actually extends nearly up to the existing tar roads and we had already long ago given up on whatever is not enclosed by wall or fence... I am not introduced to any of the group and they carry on and I continue with my work. Then, as they are leaving a while later and have to pass in front of me again, I step forward and invite them to at least see Sri Ganesh; they all stop in their tracks and walk back with me to the door of the temple and stand there silently and give their pranams, and even the two Aurovilians have to follow suit. Then the senior most fellow, perhaps under some itch of conscience or decency, invites me to walk behind the temple and show me the area which must come under their authority, as maintenance area, and this includes the well… So I protest and remind them that in previous visits their people – an engineer in particular – had seemed to agree that the well must not be touched… I give the man my whole argument again; he mentions that monetary compensation will be given, to which I reply that money is nothing while water is life and this is an excellent well and the public has access to it already, and so on… He repeats several times that I must give my suggestions to the Secretary…. All the while, I get absolutely no support, not even a nod, from either of the two Aurovilians, who seem to be almost embarrassed, on behalf of Auroville, by my unreasonableness…! On my part, I keep telling this man that such destruction is simply not acceptable, and that a harmonious solution must be found to everyone’s benefit; he then suggests that I can lay slabs over the well and redirect the pipes and ducts into the compound, while the well would be in their area…!

And I keep wondering, sadly, how it is that the Auroville Administration has made no effort whatsoever to better preserve this

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