In 1970, In the record of his meeting with The Mother, Prem wrote that “The Mother made a statement that this was the reason why She wanted the Indian Pavilion to be the first to be built, as India was the one country which had an unbroken spiritual heritage and one which could act as an example for the other pavilions to follow.”

The original design of Bharat Nivas was for an auditorium, a restaurant, a school of linguistics, a guest house and pavilions for the different states of India . The Mother wanted the Government of India to provide the funds for building the Pavilion. A grant of Rs 90 lakhs was received. Unfortunately, this money was not used for the purpose for which it was granted and the buildings that had begun – the auditorium, the restaurant and three circular state pavilions – remained unfinished.

AV Today describes Auroville’s first ever Festival of Dance on March 30th in the Sri Aurobindo Auditorium:

a wonderful evening inclusive of everything from classical Indian dances(???) to Spanish, jazz, ballet, hip-hop, Afro-funk and improvisational modern dance plus freestyle aerobics, all choreographed in Auroville, and performed by more than 15 groups – around 100 dancers!”

Since AV Today boldly ented this article with “Shiva himself, as Lord of the Dance, seemed to make His presence felt among us”, one would imagine that there were indeed wonderful Bharatanatyam dancers there. In reality, there was… 1: a Canadian student, who dances Bharatanatyam as well as an average Japanese chef can dance English ballet. Did it make Nataraja, the Lord of the Cosmic dance proud? Or did it make him turn his face away?

Was this event in the Pavilion of India indeed highlighting the spiritual values of the ancient Indian culture? Well, Sri Aurobindo warned against the events that can only excite the Vital, sub-rational humanity :

As to the performers, their experience seems well summed up by one of the participants: “We had the tremendous fun of working with our fellow performers towards a shared common goal, and the joy of achieving it after so many high energy practice sessions and so much fun and laughter. The sense of being a closely knit team and of succeeding together was, for those of us who had never done anything like it before, just fantastic, really euphoric, a memory to treasure all our lives. In fact I know from talking with others that we remained on a ‘high’ for days afterwards as a result of what we experienced.

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