 Rwy'n ffordd! Rwy'n ffordd! Rwy'n ffordd! Rwy'n ffordd! Rwy'n ffordd! Rwy'n ffordd! Rwy'n ffordd! Rwy'n ffordd! Rwy'n ffordd! Rwy'n ffordd! Rwy'n ffordd! Rwy'n ffordd! Rwy'n ffordd! Halu e. Chytis, can you give me access? Halu. Halu. Can you hear me? Yeah. Good morning, everybody. Come in and please be seated. Hello everybody, especially people who are outside. Please come in and be seated. Come in front. There are a lot of seats in front. Artists for the day, they can take the back seat right now and come in. Welcome all beautiful artists of the day. You are looking so pretty. Inauguration. Should we start? Check. Good morning to one and all. She is Priyanka. And she is Premie. We extend a warm welcome to our oldest members who have been diligently supporting us from the beginning, as well as to every new face to our 53rd annual get-together. Thank you for being with us today. Now I invite our chief guest, Nidnima Oosa, governing board Aureval, Jayanthi Ravi, secretary Aureval foundation, Louis Auremon executive, Anandi Porthu's distribution centre and Ramalingam's sustenance restaurant to commence the event by lighting the lamp. I took with us to be the first guest and we will be delighted to set off the guests. It's up until the chief guest arrives. I'll just start with a small prayer. with a small prayer. Mw shigawagana mw ddagahasta Cha margana vilamita sutra Va manneshwaraputra Now I invite our chief guest, Gautam Kaushal, Nirmana Oosa governing board, Jayanti Ravi Secretary of Audible Foundation, Louie Auroboard Executive, Anandi Purthu's Distributing Centre, Ramalingam Sustainance Resturants to commence the event by lighting the lamp. Ippol ydw, nam mwdyl nigal fawr, nam byrindanarugalei, cwtthywilakku eitri fawr ac anbu'r ddanfaraf i'r grwm. We also invite our working committee members to please light the lamp. Anai fyw rwkwm, Nandri. Thank you. Nigailchi ei todwngywad ar gwrth yw, thangyl anai fyw rwkwm, enghlwyddeu'i iddeim ganinddau anbae We all are a part of this institution due to our shared passion for the vision of the institution. Our passion unites us and our hard work strengthens the institution. Innan na alil, unrhyw yw'r unrhyw yw, pangalipu yw, walangymar yw, thangyl yw'r unrhyw yw, kurwilakku galai, arpanipu mattym e, aurawil nagarath unrhyw yw, betraicwm waliwag yw, unrhyw yw'r unrhyw yw, enghlwyddi'r unrhyw yw. In the upcoming months, you will learn and practice intuitive programmes through seminars and exclusive events designed to enhance your hands-on experience and professional skills. Now we have a welcome dance by Dya Dance Studio. Adythad aga, Dya nadana cwyddiwyn argylfaen argylfaen. Pamasra wastam, Jeisdra rajam rhamana, rhamana spath, anyshrum annoti, bisidas adanum. Mr Jayanthi Ravi, to please give a welcome to the audience of this programme, and to the audience of this programme, and to the audience of this programme, to the audience of this programme, please give a welcome speech. Dya, Gautam Ghoshal ji, Nirima ji, all the members of the working committee, all the citizens, the people of Auroville, little children, and all the people who are watching this in the live streaming as well. Today it's a very special day. We are starting the commencing, commencing the Auroville festival, which is a week of birthday. Sort of flanking it. We have the sweet mother's birthday today, and it will go on till the 28th. I think this is a very special moment of time for all of us to dedicate ourselves to collectively bring together the cadences of harmony and work towards manifesting a beautiful symphony that we see stuck on the walls of this beautiful building. The exhibition of Roger. We also see the model that has recently gone to MoMA. It has been displayed here. So collectively, this is again a dedication of all of us to see the city manifest, but the city again is not just about the roads, buildings, brick and mortar, but it's also about the human beings there, their cultural richness, the kind of harmony they bring in, and the kind of goodwill, unity, love, truth and courage with which we all inhabit this beautiful place on planet Earth, one of its kind, full of abundance, beauty, harmony, and which really constantly inspires us, pushes us to bring out the best in us and to help this truly becoming the cradle of the Superman. So I again welcome you all for this very special, significant moment in the history of Auroville. It is also the 150th birth anniversary of Sri Aurobindo in that spirit. Again, let's pray to the Divine Mother to give all of us the strength to do whatever we all have to do with complete conviction and as we really try to attain the highest aspiration that we all have to welcome again. Namaste, Vanakam. Thank you for your very beautiful speech. Now I invite Umar to talk about this festival. Vanakam, namaste, bojo, to everybody. Mother's birthday today, very, very special day and one secret, Tuan's birthday today. So we have to have personally, whenever I see Tuanji, I just feel very, very happy. There is so much what he represents me for Auroville and inspires us, inspires me very deeply and I know many people who look up to you. Happy birthday, dear term. So nice that we met in the hall. Now today is the first hour or rather third hours we are already started in the morning. We just completed unity walk, which was on the crown and many of us joined and just have come over here. We have beautiful performance and opening day. Right now from here we have Savitri Bhavan flower exhibition opening, community art canvases opening at the same time at Solar Kitchen children are going to paint. In the evening in Solar Kitchen campus we have open air movie projection on Sri Arbindo, most welcome. You will see lights everywhere in Auroville to mark the special day of the birthday week and mother's birthday today and all the team who have worked so hard for it. Right now there are more than 50, 60 volunteers have worked on Auroville festival. Although it started with just two of us, Lakshaya and me. Lakshaya, can I call you on the stage please? So it was just two of us we wanted to do something and now it has become all the posters, communication what you are seeing is Lakshaya's work. Lakshaya also brought a dimension of making Auroville festival as a yearly planned event which we always did event but we never planned it organized way. So Lakshaya guided us this year to do that and he made us work very hard and we all kind of ran behind him in the room we have... Selvaraz has worked very, very hard where is Selvar sitting here? Selvar is sitting behind. All the lights which you see on the road is possible because Jan Majer has been holding that space so big clap to him. There is a lot of... there are four location event is happening and you are in the location one which is Unity Pavilion Savitri Vaavan Junction. Second location is PTDC Solar Kitchen and ITS location. Third junction of the festival is Kalpana Human Escape and Mahalakshmi Park. The fourth location is Kalabhumi and especially Kalabhumi which was a very kind of not active place in a way Selvaraz has put a lot of energy to make it beautiful, clean, literally clean. He has been working for last eight days non-stop over there and all the location looks very, very beautiful because Kalia's team, Krishna and Kalia has helped us to do that so thank you Kalia for that. And there is... of course Unity Walk could happen in the morning because road service and TDC and foundation office and working committees stood behind us. We made a request, can we walk on mother's birthday on the crown pathway as a symbol of unity and we were supported. It's a great gift to all of us and it was... everybody took their part of courage and push to stand up and didn't say no to us. They said we will try and guess what, we just completed the walk. The second walk of Unity Walk is on birthday week of Auroville on 28th of February. Seven o'clock again, we meet here to walk in a much more beautiful way and we did have breakfast. I was one of our guests, tell me your name again. She walked barefoot. So she gave away... Antra gave her footwear to another guest and she had her footwear broken and she walked barefoot and she had no idea that it's Auroville's mother's but they are Auroville's very special birthday week and walking on the pathway without knowing that's Auroville's magic. So thank you, Antra, for joining us and all of you, Jaya has been working very, very hard to make the exhibition we are going to see now and she would open it and tell us about it. So right now I would like to invite our distinguished guest. Please come and say a few words to us and then Nilima, you are after us. So we promise, yes. Good morning, it was an unusual experience in the morning, usually after the COVID I wake up too late in the morning but somehow I woke up at four and I called so that I could join the amphitheater meditation. So it's very nice to be here with you and I'll be here to support you in every cause and let us work for Auroville and for human unity. Thank you. Hello, good morning and bonjour from Nilima. I'm a member of Gurnipour. So today is the birthday of our sweet mother, bonfaite to our sweet mother. I'll just read a message from the card, every Darshan day the card has been distributed at Sri Aurovindo Ashram. So I'll just read what is the message today. Sri Aurovindo writes for our sweet mother, there is one divine force which acts in the universe and in the individual and is also beyond the individual and the universe. The mother stands for all three but she is working here in the body to bring down something not yet expressed in this material world. So as to transfer life here. It is so that you should regard her as the divine Shakti working here for that purpose. She is that in the body and her whole consciousness, she is also identified with all the other aspects of the divine force, Sri Aurovindo. Thank you very much. It is so nice to be here with all of you in Auroville. Thank you. Bonfaite. Thank you, Nilima. That was a wonderful speech. Now I invite Arun, the working committee member to give a few words. Good morning to everyone. I'll just make it very short and sweet. I would like to give my open big and a very thankful birdie wish to the mother for making this project happen and for one hour youngest friends, Twans also. Happy birdie wishes. So as this is a very special week, we need the mother's blessing to really fall on us to strengthen our unity and move ahead with the dreams that the mother wanted Auroville to be. So let's pray very happily and honestly for things to move on and things will move on as we have a strong support from the mother and also from the people. Thank you. I would like to invite Jaya to introduce the bokei exhibition. It's not going to be a full lecture but I really would like to share with you the work because this is something that I love. It's a number of years ago that I actually, maybe it starts a little bit, I used to work with the international zone in the 90s. I was the coordinator. In 2004 I had to go to Sweden to look after my parents till they passed away and at that time I took up contact with a lady, Vera Hayden-Lew who was in the ashram often in the 60s, a Swedish lady. I had taken the task of taking Auroville to Sweden. So she had printed pamphlets, etc. and in the contact with her she was actually on her way to pass out of this life. So she contacted me before I went back to Auroville and said, Jaya, could you please take all my materials related to Auroville because my children will not care for it. So I'm an avid reader and I wrote all these books and things and I found this book amongst them. This one I took back to Auroville and when I showed it to Jacqueline she said, but this is an original and it's in good condition, not like the one we still had in Auroville which was termite, et cetera. So this is from I think 71 and it is a detailed study of the galaxy which has been given to mother and approved. So that kind of that and the international zone brought me also into contact with Jacqueline because I was getting after 2000 more and more curious and interested. So then at one point when Jacqueline had scanned all these drawings which you see on the walls now, these are photographs of these drawings, they are drawings by Rochet, by Rochet's office in Paris, I think he had more than 100 people that he worked together with and the Lavernier office in Pondicherry. A few years ago we had a smaller exhibition with a selection of these drawings but I have always wanted to put them all out. I also felt that in Auroville when we discuss this thing of the galaxy, et cetera there are so many gaps of knowledge in the community. So we say oh there is because somebody has seen the model and people don't understand the difference between scale and vision and reality. I realized many, many people, maybe most people have very difficult to see from a context it's like when we see the road which was opened and everybody cries because it looks so terrible because nobody in Auroville which lives in a house didn't look like this when they started building. None of our roads were not, you know, this is a phase in construction and in building which looks like that. So anyway, so we decided, usually we always have the art for land exhibition in February but we decided not to have it because we were simply overwhelmed with other situations in the exhibition now. As I was working on the exhibition one evening I was... I am an avid reader so I was sitting and I had taken up I don't know if all of you, if you know who Richard and Kailash were. Kailash was the person in the ashram very closely connected to mother who took up the work with UNESCO with the government of India in the early days I would say that it is very much because of her also and the work that she did, of course it is mother who does everything, we know that, but the workers are there, we all are. So that we have this relation with UNESCO is very much because of Kailash. I have been very close since the 90s with Richard and Kailash and when Kailash had passed away I was helping Richard to sort out her things. Richard gave me one book which was Sut Prem's Adventure of Consciousness, the US first edition translated by Tammy Benn and she told me that this book had been given to him and Kailash by mother to study together. So one evening I picked this up book as I'm sitting in bed and I started to read in it and I see Kailash underlinings and then somehow because we were so overworked and myself too, there was no way I would be able to sit and make text to all these things. And the idea came to actually take these underlinings and use them together with the exhibition because we keep polarising things and saying this or that, but this city is about the spirit, the yoga and it is about material manifestation. It's they are not separate, there's no way they can be separate because this is all of it and this is Mother's work. So the surprise was what I was afraid, maybe this is just an idea I had, maybe it will be very random, but yesterday morning when I saw it I saw how very precise at least to me it was when I was reading this text about our present situation also. So that is about that exhibition. I want to tell you I don't have it ready and this book I don't really pass around because it's precious, but we are making a copy in graphic section now, so in one or two days there will be a copy here that everybody can come here and study and look and see because it has all the, I will just do like this, it has drawings, it has the butter paper with overlap. This is the one with the roads. These are all original hand drawings, but we will have a good copy here tomorrow or day after tomorrow and it will be available here to come and look in. So everybody can see what is, not what we think or imagine because we saw one thing, really let us go with knowledge on that level. I've been longing for that. So that will come. When I was working with this I wrote the mail to Richard because I was using Kailash material from the book that he had given me and two days later I got the mail back from him saying, Jaya, I got so inspired by what you are doing and I feel we should use the hibiscuses. Now, in the beginning of the 70s Richard was working with the, he's a key person that we have the flower book and that we have all these names given by Mother. They brought her flowers every day. Not only we never work alone in Auroville. I stand here and speak for Unit Pavilion, but if it wasn't the whole team who has been working like madhaters we would not have this. So it's the same thing, but Richard was very, very crucial in this. So they had made in the beginning of the 70s, they have tried to paint all the hibiscuses for the matrimandir. It's not absolutely complete, but what I have from Richard is the originals of these paintings. They are painted by Richard, by Kailash and by a few other Ashramites. So this we have in the Hall of Peace. For me since the beginning of the Unit Pavilion it has been very, very important to honour people and to honour the past. When we had our first foundation laying stone that was actually my first contact with Kailash I had been told that she had been very instrumental with international stone, but we had completely forgotten that part of Auroville's history. So I asked her, went and invited and we sent a taxi for them to come. And the interesting thing was that we had decided first we were looking which VIP shall we invite. And then there was this flash that everybody put, a brick. And we arranged that with our contractors. So we had a ditch and there was a number of masons and everybody could lay a brick in this foundation. So there were lines, people queued up to get the brick and the flowers and the colours on it and to hand it over. And this I did not know about, but Kailash just told me before she passed away that she was standing in one line and then suddenly it shifted so she came first in line. I didn't even know about it, but it made me very, very happy. This is how mother works. She puts us where we should be and we should honour each other and the past. And yeah, I'm talking long. So I just would like to say that do look at exhibition, encourage people to look, come back when we have them. I don't know if who went away with it now. Oh, it's inside now. Very, very good. So very good. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoy it. If you see some small mistakes or some pictures have fallen, just let us know. We continually will keep on upgrading it. Thank you very much for coming and being here. Thank you so much, Jaya. Next, I call Jen Majae to introduce the Odisha exhibition. Pranam, all of you. I mean, as mothers, I love so much to art and culture. So I feel like to, in our festival, will focus the art and culture, what exactly India contributes. So I will invite all of you to witness the wonderful exhibition with art and crafts, which is unique. So now I request Dr Jayantirabi to officially inaugurate the exhibition. Thank you so much. I invite Jayantirabi Ma'am to felicitate the kids who gave us a beautiful dance performance today. Ma'am answer, please also join with us on stage. I also call the working committee members to kindly join us. Thank you so much for coming and once again, happy birthday to all of us. Thank you again. Just a few words, practical stuffs. The festival was being updated to 11 o'clock in the night. So we could not send out the final schedule with adequate time for everyone to plan their event. Please excuse us perhaps from next year onwards. We will be better prepared for the event. And if you look at the schedule, there are about 12 different types of categories of events which has been arranged from morning 7 o'clock till about 9 o'clock in the evening. And of course, these are all volunteer contributors. So whoever wanted to contribute in whatever form we included them in the schedule. So it starts right in the morning at 7 o'clock, say from clean up work, which is being hosted by Krishna to flower decoration work in Savitri Bhavan. So on, so forth. You might see the full schedule. For more details, you may visit AuroNet. We are in the process of updating all the information, all the details in the AuroNet. Or you can visit festival.auroville.org. And if you have any queries, any suggestions, if you look at the schedule and if you find there are any mistakes, please write to festival at the rate auroville.org.in. We would be happy to correct ourselves. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming early in the morning for the festival. Thank you all.