Ahilya Bamroo is passionate about many things: acting, music, sustainability, shopping local. But she is perhaps most passionate about the places she calls home: Auroville and Pondicherry. From her first crush to her pet peeves and favourite club songs, the actor, content creator and friend of QUOD recalls the hilarious and heartwarming memories and emotions that make a home. As QUOD returns home, so does she.

On childhood pranks

I used to like playing pranks on my teachers but on a small scale. I remember this one time my friend and I were in an embroidery class and we were so bored, we wanted time to go faster. So, I snuck under the table and started to sing. And then my friend was like “oh no, they’ve started playing the radio, we can’t focus on class so I’m going to go outside and tell them to stop.” Thinking back, there is no way you can confuse a sound coming from under the table with the sound coming from a radio outside. I think we were completely delusional about the whole situation and the teacher was just humouring us but we wasted fifteen minutes with this whole fiasco. That’s a weird ass story, actually.

On her favourite cartoons growing up

There was this cartoon called Kipper. He was this little dog and had a pig friend and they had these beautifully illustrated little adventures. I loved Oswald and Courage the Cowardly Dog. Cartoon Network was my jam. But I liked Pogo too.

On what she loves about Pondicherry and Auroville

Pondicherry is very beautiful and walkable and you’re on the coast. When I was growing up, it was very quiet as well. I think it only became more of a tourist destination post 2013-2014. But there was a time when I would never see a car. You would see motorcycles and cycles and once in a while, you’d see a Maruti Suzuki and be like, whoa, that’s crazy. I also grew up in Auroville, where the multiculturalism meant I met a lot of people from different countries and cultures. I learnt a lot of different languages as a result. And accents. More accents than languages.

On the drawbacks of growing up in Auroville 

You grow up in a little bit of a bubble because the world doesn’t necessarily function like that. If you know a little bit about Auroville, it’s a socialist, communal township with alternative education and ways of living. So, I essentially grew up in this experiment. It was great as a child because I had so much freedom and was always in nature and people cared about trees and plants. But it’s not clean anymore because of tourism.

In a small town, you also know everybody and don’t have the dynamism of what a city has to offer in terms of what you can do on an average Wednesday night. There are limited options. If there’s an event, it’s only because someone you know made it happen. You can’t step out and expect there to be an already established series of things for you to do. You are responsible for making things happen.

On her biggest pet peeve

My biggest pet peeve is people throwing trash on the ground. It doesn’t compute in my brain that we have this beautiful cultural ideology at Auroville of deifing nature and seeing God in everything, then why are we throwing trash on God? What’s even crazier is there are trash cans in Auroville every 500 metres away, so people just didn’t have the patience to keep their trash on them for that much time. 

On random obsessions as a child

Growing up in Pondicherry, we were all obsessed with stamps but not in a cool sense of receiving letters and creating a stamp collection. Instead, we went to a local bookshop where for 200 rupees, you could buy a pre-existing fake stamp collection. Then we’d stick them in a book and exchange stamps and create rankings for which stamps were cooler. You were cool according to which stamps you had. We were also obsessed with magnets. We’d put them in handkerchiefs and go into sand pits and search for pieces of iron. Some kid said if you collect enough iron and melt it, you get a new magnet but that’s really not true.