About Us
Hi again,
If you are going to spend your precious time reading about our adventures, then you ought to know a little bit more about us. Hopefully this will help you connect, it will put content into context, and maybe it will inspire you to reach out and share your story with us.
So here it goes, a little bit about us:
My name is Leela, I am 25 years old. I may be slightly overly enthusiastic about sport, having it programmed as a daily activity except for ‘Sunday Rest Day’ (a new introduction by Mahiran, that I admit is actually very valuable). Running and making granola are my most natural forms of meditation.
I am a foodie, having been vegetarian for most of my life, vegan for three years (though I always ate honey), and now opting to be mostly vegan especially when we cook at home but also being more fluid and exploring the horizons of eating local, organic, gluten free, and anything else that resonates with my values of sustainability and consciousness.
My passion is advocating for children and youth rights. I see young people as parchments of their environment – a lot of the time you can’t blame them for taking socially condemned paths of life. In fact, I would describe them as raw rocks lying on the shore of a hidden bay. If carefully nurtured, they have the potential to be crystals, but they are also at risk of being forgotten or even worse, thrown into the depth of a cold ocean.
A drive to support young people encouraged me to pursue higher education, first a B.A in international Justice at Leiden University College and then an MSc. in International Criminal Justice Systems at Leiden University. Opting for ‘international’ in both curricula is because I don’t feel attached nor want to be tied to any nation. Rather, I see myself as a citizen of the world being fortunate to carry French and Swiss passports from my mother, and a British heritage thanks to my father, but born and raised in an international township in South India called Auroville.
Auroville is the oldest community in the world having just turned 52. It is supported by the Indian government and it is recognised as a world heritage site by UNESCO. Auroville strives to be a place of human unity, inviting to people of all walks of life, somewhere of unending progress, a bridge between the past and the future, a place that seeks to embody sustainable and innovative practices. This was my home for the first 19 years of my life. This is where my family is, it is where I went to school, and it is where all of my first friends are from.
Mahiran is also from Auroville. His birthday actually falls on Auroville’s birthday, the 28th of February. And unlike me, his Auroville roots lie deep in India’s rich fertile soils, with his grandparents moving to Auroville, and choosing to start a family in this experimental town. They brought their first born, Mahiran’s mother, into this world – and she raised him and his brother as a single, powerful, and beautiful mother.
Years later, Mahiran and I were both born in Auroville. We grew up together in this microcosm of earthy red roads dusting the luscious greenery that cocoons the city, and yet our paths did not intersect until we had both left the cradle and then returned on our own impetus.
I went to study in the Netherlands; fueling my head with so much new, making meaningful connections, and discovering the glowing amber of potential but also loneliness which lies at the heart of concrete jungles; something so foreign to me.
Meanwhile, Mahiran was freely traveling through Australia, holding out his New Zealand passport, and pocketing his French one. A luxury of no time capsule to this chapter of exploration. He began by building tree houses with friends from home, then lived in hostels doing odd jobs here and there, to sleeping in a tent by the beach allowing him to jump on his surfboard and be woken up by the magic of the ocean. He bought a car, made new friends – fellow backpackers, and drove through the country. This chapter ended on a sour note at some obnoxious banana plantation job when COVID-19 hit. As most of the world’s activities came to a halt, he and his friend stuck to the laborious task of carrying bags of bananas often entangled with snakes, dirt staining their skin, and banana sap being the cause of two freshly shaved heads. After this, he briefly went to New Zealand, visiting his father and working with him for a while.
Mahiran returned to Auroville in December 2020, and I shortly followed at the end of January 2021 with the plan of writing my MSc thesis at home. Bang Bang on thing led to another and here we are saying I love you to each other haha.
Before fastforwarding, it is important to note that I went back to the Netherlands to graduate and pack up my apartment in July 2021. Mahiran joined me in August 2021. Then after a brief in-between in the UK, we ended up in South Portugal in the Algarve region. I was working remotely for a social enterprise as a research assistant for their Children and Youth Pillar, and Mahiran worked as a surf instructor. We lived that sunny life for six months. We then touched base with Auroville for five months and now here we are in New Zealand inviting new adventures.
