Stories

This cartoon — The Architect Not on Yellow Pages — is the first entry in what we hope will become a small archive of community moments from the bioregion. It came out of a real exchange with Dilip, in the kind of conversation that happens often in groups like Voilà Pondy and Put Me In Touch: someone shares a need, someone else points to a person, and the person at the centre of it all turns out to be impossible to find through any directory.

The strip captures that moment as banter — a single frame from the everyday absurdity of a place where the best people are often the hardest to look up. There's no Yellow Pages entry for the architect; the bioregion runs on someone-knew-someone-who-knew-someone, and the directory we're building here is, in a quiet way, the long answer to that.

The fuller story behind this strip — who Dilip is, how the conversation unfolded, what the architect ended up doing — will land here when Sree pens it down. For now the cartoon stands on its own, as a piece of evidence: this is the kind of community memory we'd like Stories to hold.

The problem it solves

If you live in or around Auroville, you know the feeling: an event you would have loved gets mentioned once in a WhatsApp group at 11 pm, disappears under 200 unread messages by morning, and you find out about it the week after when someone mentions it in passing.

The bioregion is alive with things happening — yoga classes, sound baths, film nights, workshops, visiting artists, community board notices, skilled trades people — but the information lives scattered across half a dozen group chats, physical noticeboards, PDFs, and word of mouth. There is no single, calm place to look.

What it is

livinginauroville.in is a hand-curated, automatically-updated index of what is happening in the Auroville–Pondicherry bioregion. It is a single web page you can open on any phone or laptop, with no account and no app to install.

It shows dated events organised by when they happen — today, this week, next week, this month — alongside a yellow pages of recurring classes and services, trades and contacts, and a community board. A search bar at the top lets you filter everything instantly.

How it works

Every few hours, a pipeline reads the WhatsApp groups and other sources, vision-scans event posters using AI, extracts dates and details, and merges new cards into the live page. Stale events are automatically removed. The whole site is a single HTML file — no database, no framework, no moving parts that can go wrong.

The result is a page that feels like a hand-curated community board but updates itself in the background without any manual effort after the initial setup.

The sources

The index currently draws from seven sources across WhatsApp, print, and the web:

The ethos

This is a community tool, not a business. There are no ads, no affiliate links, no tracking pixels, and no monetisation planned. The page respects the privacy of everyone who posts in the source groups — event posters are shared as they were shared publicly, and no personal contact details are extracted without consent.

The curation philosophy mirrors something this community already knows: signal-to-noise matters. Not everything that moves through a group chat deserves to be on a public index. Genuine events and community-facing services are included; pure commercial spam is not.

What's next

The site is a beta — imperfect, evolving, and built incrementally based on what the community actually finds useful. If you notice an event that's missing, a business that should be in the yellow pages, or something on the board that has changed, the best route is to share it — either via the gap report on the site itself, or directly.

Planned: more physical noticeboards, a Tamil-language layer, integration with auroartworld.org's curated event calendar, and a lighter mobile summary view for a quick morning glance.