My bizarre childhood in Auroville

I wasn't surprised by the allegations of child abuse at Auroville - a progressive European community in India - that a BBC news team made this week. As a nine-year-old boy I lived there for three months in 1982. The place is a religious sect which shows up the arrogance, naivety and denial of liberal middle-class values. It puts children in serious danger.

A town of great temple-like structures set among palm trees in the Tamil Nadu region of south-east India, Auroville promotes a humanist philosophy, elements of Indian mysticism and a US 'frontier'-style attitude. This either wore you down or toughened you up.

Adults work in construction, farming or even on a newspaper; parenting is a pretty low priority. Anyone could be a guardian, and children were left to run wild from the age of

six.

My own mother left me and my seven-year-old sister to fend for ourselves and disappeared to a remote section of the community to be with her lover. We had somewhere to sleep, a well-managed primary school, and day trips on the weekends. At meal times children ate by themselves, with a set of unwritten rules - if you got your hands on sweets you shared them with the group, else you ate outside.

Adults seemed to be there to provide for us, but with complete emotional disengagement. When the infection from a blister spread throughout my arm and I sought out my mother for help, she just dismissed me as an attention-seeker and I had to cycle to the doctor on my own. He rushed me to a hospital that had run out of anaesthetic. I remember being held down by six medics while one made an incision with a scalpel and another squeezed the poison out of my arm.

I learned to fit in with the other children and we became emotionally dependent on