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Note: This Core Group was soon looked at, as the first Government-instituted apex
body for the Matrimandir, as both an arbiter and a sort of basket to throw in one’s
various complaints and allegations, variously outrageous. One of Roger A’s most
fervent supporters on the site had for some time been Jean P., who had as his first
priority and sacred mission the task to somehow get me out. He had sustained this
determination over the years, ever since Auragni’s mother, Diane, had left him to
be near me. Late March, 2003, Jean P. had written one of those tirades to the Core
Group, and we had been given a copy of it. I took this as an opportunity, mid-April,
to write in turn to the Core Group an open letter regarding the kind of practice such
as Jean P’s letter propounded in Auroville – there had been by then so many awful,
absurd, vicious, crazy accusations spoken and written about us, and particularly
about Arjun and me, and specifically about me, that one somehow ceased to lend
people the “benefit of doubt” (that they had perhaps been genuinely misinformed or
confused, for instance).
This was the text of my letter:
*Open letter to the Core Group, with Copies to the Auroville Council and
the Support Group, from Divakar, 14-4-2003:
“In a general atmosphere of diffuse conflict it is easy to provide the passive
audience with a few strategic lies that will go a long way, with the least effort, in
feeding and justifying a specific antagonism, giving it body and shape.
It is old and lowest tactics: deliberate and purposeful defamation, well-timed and
placed, will yield disproportionate results, possibly exponential.
In the world at large what we here, with all our presumption which is truly ridicule,
call the ‘ordinary world’, societies have evolved all along their fault lines sets and
series of mechanisms, processes of appeal and redress, with a view to preserve and
uphold justice.
But we, under the pretext of being part of an experiment and an adventure in
search of new forms and new methods to manifest the spirit of the future, claim the
right to dispense from these mechanisms and processes. Further, we seek to
substantiate this claim with the profession of being ‘the willing servitors of the
Divine consciousness’, an outrageous statement at the best of times, but who are
we actually cheating. Possibly our own little minds only.
So in live practical terms what we have is a free, lawless market of the worse kind
where each peddler can display their dubious wares shamelessly while piously
uttering Her name.
Letters filled with the cheapest venom and the grossest slander such as Paul V.’s –
who has gained remarkable notoriety with this very practice over the years – and
Jean P.’s are usually signed under the sacred words ‘at Her service’.
Variations of the same have been so callous that these miserable diatribes will
sometimes end with ‘Truth’, as if Truth indeed had directly inspired, nay, dictated
their words.