What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?

Auroville is India's 'future city', a socialist Utopia - with maids. So how did a Co Wicklow teenager end up there, asks Róisín Ingle.

Impi Sacker, who is from Blessington, in Co Wicklow, was 14 when she came to Auroville, the experiment in "human unity" established in 1968 in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. "I needed something completely different in my life, so when the opportunity came up I went for it," she says. Three years later the only Irish resident of Auroville has settled into the town, where people of about 40 nationalities live and work together to create a self-sustaining city of the future with hardly any rules.

Impi is keen to dispel some of the misperceptions outsiders still have about the project. Auroville is not, she says, a backward place full of old hippies with an aversion to modern technology. "We have actually been asked whether we go to school on elephants," she laughs. "When I first arrived I was amazed by how like the West Auroville was in some ways. People have the latest motorbikes and we watch Friends. It's a Western oasis in India, and everyone who comes here is surprised by that."

While her counterparts at home are slogging for the Leaving Cert she is studying for an A-level in English, among other subjects. Classes with her teacher and friend Roger are often held outside the brand new "Future School", in the shade of a tree, but if she decided to drop her studies tomorrow nobody at the school would make a fuss.

"Sometimes we have to call up Roger to remind him that the holidays are over and he should get back to teaching us," she smiles, relaxing in the sunshine beside the community's landmark monument, the Matrimandir. "It can be a bit lax, but if you do come to school it means you want to learn and not that you are being forced to learn, which I think is healthy."

There is pin-drop silence over at the Future School's well-stocked library, where young heads are bent over large chemistry and English books. The free and easy nature of Auroville has an interesting effect on the youth. "Life without rules breeds a different kind of person," Impi says. "You definitely take more responsibility for yourself. Some people here take that freedom a little too far, but mostly they control themselves pretty well."

Last year, with the help of some friends, the teenager set up a theatre company and put on a production of her favourite play, The Important Of Being Earnest. "That's the kind of thing you can do here. It feels like anything is possible," she says.

If Auroville is, as the posters in the visitor centre declare, a city with a soul, then that soul can be found at the Matrimandir, the futuristic structure dominating the perfectly manicured gardens in the centre of Auroville like a giant golf trophy.

The Co Wicklow teen rarely visits the windowless white chamber inside the Matrimandir, which contains 12 free-standing marble pillars and, at its centre, a large, optically perfect disc of glass onto which the sun shines through a precise hole in the roof. The mirrors that create a similar effect when night falls are fuelled by a small field of solar panels outside.

Both Auroville, which means City of Dawn, and the inner chamber were the vision of a Frenchwoman known as the Mother, who was a disciple of Sri Aurobindo, a celebrated guru around whom an ashram was built in the nearby French- Indian city of Pondicherry. Every evening, after the tourists have lined up barefoot and in single file for a brief glimpse inside, Aurovilians arrive to meditate in the inner room or sit on a bench outside, eyes closed, under the impressive banyan tree.

With the lush grass and gold discs winking in the sun, the scene looks like something out of an old episode of Star Trek. Impi and her friend Sam Allen, a 20-year-old from Somerset, in England, go to aerobics or have friends round for dinner and a video instead. "It's not that I don't respect her, but being a devotee of the Mother is not compulsory to live in Auroville," says Sacker.

She came for two months initially, after her sister spent some time here with friends of their mother and father, who have been Aurovilians for years. "My parents had very different ideas about education," explains Impi, whose father was a lecturer at Trinity College in Dublin. Most of the family were home-schooled, and before coming to Auroville Sacker also lived in Sweden and England.

One thing the Mother was clear on was that Aurovilians should be untainted by hard currency, so there are no jangling tills in the cute little community supermarket, which is called Pour Tous. Residents have a special card so transactions can be done electronically, the money taken from their central account. One typically Aurovilian sign declares: "Pour Tous is here to serve the needs of Auroville without the internal exchange of money. Please be patient and polite on the premises."

But the place is not entirely rupee-free. Visitors to Auroville are allowed to pay with cash at the Solar Cafe or at the visitor-centre gift shop, where small discs of leaf gold, the same as those used to coat the Matrimandir, can be picked up for a few euro, the proceeds going back into the community. During high season tourists head to the guest accommodation - mostly beach huts on stilts - run by Aurovilians along the coast.

Further inland the red-clay dirt tracks of Auroville link 80 communities scattered over 20 square kilometres. If the Mother's vision of a city for 50,000 residents is to be realised, though, Aurovilians need to purchase even more land.

When you comment to one Aurovilian that it looks as if there is no life, never mind dozens of industrious communities beyond the cleverly planted roadside vegetation, she laughs and says "good". The landscaping is meant to confuse nosy visitors. "Sometimes it's like living in a human zoo, with people knocking on your door, asking you questions about your life. So we try to dissuade people from exploring too far," says Mauna - Aurovilians don't use their second names - who works in the press office.

Even if they finance and build their own, often architecturally cutting-edge homes, residents have no property rights, and all resources are pooled for the good of the community, so perhaps it's understandable that Aurovilians are a little precious about their world. You have to live and work in Auroville for two years, paying monthly contributions, before becoming an Aurovilian.

Even the guide books sternly remind visitors that Auroville is not a tourist attraction, although if you write well in advance you can come and stay with residents for long periods. Unless you know the place well, finding your way around is tricky. Lost visitors can often be found wandering aimlessly through the labyrinth of communities named Prosperity or Plenitude, Sincerity or Grace.

Not surprisingly, I get lost twice trying to find Angad, an Indian Aurovilian who runs Mantra Pottery. He employs Indian potters, one of whom has earned a reputation as a master craftsman as far afield as Bombay. An Oxford graduate, Angad came here in the 1970s after a failed foray into the film industry, when he tried to produce a biopic of Michael Collins in London. For economic reasons he and his colleagues planned to shoot the movie in Spain, painting hills green and using technical wizardry to produce authentic Irish mist, but he says the plans were halted when during pre-production he received a call from a man he believes was a member of the IRA.

"The voice on the other end had an Irish accent. He said: 'We like Indians, we have a lot in common with you guys, but you are not going to make this film,' " recalls Angad. "It scared me, I have to say." He packed up and left for India, escaping the corporate career and arranged marriage that were planned for him, instead committing himself to the Mother and Auroville.

He has a large, comfortable home and a busy workshop, which fills orders from all over India. His devotion to the Mother, whom he first met as a teenager, has never wavered, but even so he doesn't hold back in his criticism of the Auroville project.

Although he is on the whole happy that Auroville is working slowly towards the vision of the Mother - "I would have packed up long ago if I weren't," he says - as an Indian he has issues about the way locals are treated. "There is a weird attitude towards local people," he says. "They are welcome to come and work here, to plant trees and dig holes, to stand guard in the hot afternoon sun so that goats don't trample on crops, but when it comes to actually joining Auroville that's another story."

One of his employees has worked with him for 18 years and has twice been refused permission to join. "That irritates me," he says.

A third of the Auroville population is Indian, but he believes that if the Mother's ideal of human unity is to be realised there needs to be more representation from people who grew up in the Tamil villages dotted around official Auroville land. But like most other workers here he still donates 99 per cent of his profits to the community, to help pay for the free health, recreation, education and other services availed of by residents. Schools to educate local villagers have also been set up with some success.

If they take a bit of getting used to - Aurovilians are sometimes chilly and aloof to outsiders - the 1,200 adult residents and about 400 children from countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Australia and America clearly have good intentions at heart. Bindu, another Indian Aurovilian, is typical of the kind of idealists the place attracts.

"Most of us in Auroville are dreamers. More than anything that is what unites us. We are trying to find a new way of living, a new way to create human unity," she says. "We believe there is a better world possible, a way to create an integrated human being who is conscious of what she is doing, how she's acting and always striving for goodness. But we are evolving together, and you will find the same weaknesses here as you will in any society."

As for Auroville's only Irish resident, Impi Sacker doesn't know how long more she will stay, but she is enjoying the opportunities afforded by the town. If she had one complaint it would be that Aurovilians and most other Westerners who live here are looked after by Indian maids who do everything from the washing-up to the laundry.

"I know it's good, because we are providing jobs to support the local community, but it feels strange when you are used to doing things yourself," she says. Her friend Sam, who lives here with her mother, brother and grandmother, says Auroville can be a lonely place for young people arriving from the West. "Because there is such a transient community young people don't make friends easily, knowing that the new person could be gone with a couple of years," she says.

Without structure and guidelines she believes some Auroville children "can get a bit lost" but that on the whole it is a fascinating place to live and to learn. "It's an incredible town, with a freedom young people at home in Ireland could only dream about. It's the kind place where you see groups of four-year-olds, all different nationalities, walking to school together or just playing in nature, safe and free. There is independence and freedom from a young age. I love that."