Into the heart of Auroville

Over the next two days we do our best to participate in the Auoville experience. Wednesday morning Lori has an Ikebana lesson. Valeria Matsumoto is her teacher, originally from Italy but moved to Auroville with her Japanese husband. They met while they were both sailing around the world and life eventually took them to Auroville. He became a furniture-maker and she teaches Ikebana. One thing you can say about Auroville, it does draw some fascinating people.

While Lori has her class, I sit under Valeria's fan for an hour trying to cool down from our bike ride, then explore the "community" outside. Most buildings in Auroville are in communities, with names like 'Progress', 'Sincerity', 'Revelation' and 'Horizon'. Earth-brick experimental architecture abounds, so I give the camera a good workout.

That evening we catch a free performance of traditional Indian dance from Orissa at the Bharat Nivas Pavillion (complete with framed portraits of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother sitting at the edge of the stage).The dancer gives a short explanation before each dance, which helps us follow the stories they tell. For once I am able to follow a story through dance! My favorite is about a young Krishna acting naughty and being scolded by his mother, until she discovers her son's true nature (an incarnation of the god Vishnu). Our performer switches between the two characters in a very convincing way. Her fellow dancer, also her sister, also gives an outstanding performance (and we sneak a few blurry pictures).


Back at the gust house after dinner, we head to the roof terrace to check out the full moon. The bright moonlight inspires me to try some long-exposure photos, but I catch something unexpected in this shot...

(click the picture for a larger view to see a "ghost")

Muragon and Nandini Get Married (Again)

Early morning at Gaia's Garden became torturous, as the planned daily power outage meant no ceiling fan from 6-9am. When it's almost 100 degrees and 80% humidity, a rotating ceiling fan is like life itself: precious. We set off to explore more of Auroville by bike. We sought out a shortcut that was indicated on the Auroville map and luckily found it through trial and error. It saved us from riding on the local roads which, as mentioned previously, have Indian drivers on them!

We decided to have lunch again at the Solar Kitchen - it was 'Spaghetti N' Some Other Stuff' day. After eating, we headed upstairs to the SK Cafe where we indulged in deliciously refreshing Iceberg Coffee, cold coffee and chocolate with a float of ice cream. Luckily, none of the ants in the tree above made it into our glasses.

We then went on a search for the workshop of Gilles, a French-Aurovillian craftsman who designed these really clean, modern brass vessels. (Auroville is full of artisans and creative people.) I was hoping to find something for myself as well as Saktivel's family, as we were invited for dinner that evening. We couldn't visit the village empty-handed! We ended up bringing a brass vase, candles, fruit, and LEGOs for the kids.

If this were a Bollywood movie, a song would play now, a sweeping melodic landscape with romantic lyrics, the intro to 'Our Village Wedding'. We went to dinner at Saktivel's and were transformed into 'Muragon' and 'Nandini', local villagers getting married. It was so fun! Everyone played along, calling us by our new Tamil names. Saktivel, Lakshmi and Saranya dressed us up in our fancy outfits, me in a lovely sari and Brian in a vesti, a white cloth with gold threads.

Before we got dressed up though, we hung out and chatted while Lakshmi fashioned a garland of jasmine flowers for me to wear in my hair. I tried my hand at weaving the flower buds and cotton string together, but was definitely lacking the skill Lakshmi has!

After lots of photos of us dressed up, we sat down for dinner. We were treated to gobi pakodas (cauliflower coated in a peppy spice mix and fried), which everyone enjoyed. I made sure to ask how to make them! Then, it was the 'bride and groom's' turn to eat. We ate while everyone else watched and told us how to eat our first meal together as 'newlyweds'. First, we fed each other some sweets. Typically at weddings family and close friends bring sweets to the couple and they are expected to take a nibble of each one to say “thank you”. Next, we fed each other rice. This was challenging; YOU try to feed your new spouse loose rice with your hand without getting it all over!

Then it was time for us to hand out the gifts we brought. When we were home in Seattle, I found these small LEGO sets and thought they'd be great fun, easy to pack and uncommon in India. Saktivel's kids loved them! They immediately started putting them together. After we left, we vowed to send more LEGOS to the kids.

We all chatted a bit more but we realized that the family would not eat until we left. Since it was approaching 9pm, we figured we had better head home to Gaia's Garden. After arranging our taxi, we changed back into 'Brian' and 'Lori', leaving behind our fancy wedding clothes, our Tamil names, and our Tamil friends. It was a bittersweet goodbye, knowing that we may never set eyes on each other again.

Village Life

Today we continued our village experiences with a visit to Eshwari's house for lunch. Our regular taxi driver Maya turns out to be a friend of hers (small world!) and we snap pictures of the area outside Pondicherry as we drive to her village.


Eshwari commutes almost an hour each day by bus to and from her village. Lori remembers it from her last trip, and Eshwari's cooking is just as good as ever! After lunch, we hang out with her, her son, daughter-in-law and some friends. We chat and wait for the daily scheduled power outage to end (12 to 3pm) so the ceiling fan can start spinning. It's absolutely sweltering! We all cheer as it kicks on, right on schedule. But soon it's time to brave the heat and go visit Eshwari's family land. Down the road a bit we meet her mother and father at their tiny farmhouse; dad cuts open some home-grown coconuts for a quick drink.
 
Then we set out across the brilliant green rice fields, stepping carefully on the narrow raised path between the paddies. Peanuts are growing here too. Have you ever had a raw peanut straight out of the ground? Bet you can't eat just one!
 
A group of men nearby are cutting sugar cane; Eshwaris' dad offers to have them cut some cane for a sweet afternoon snack! So we hang out under the coconut trees, gnaw on raw cane and peanuts, and enjoy the breeze and scenery.

Lori starts a discussion about farming. Turns out the rice paddy next to us can be harvested in about an hour by machine instead of a few days by hand. And it can be re-planted three times a year. But who will keep the centuries-old family farm running in the future? Eshwari's brothers won't. Her son drives a bus and is not interested. But she's determined that they won't sell it off; she knows once you sell your land, you'll never get it back. We appreciate the scenic vistas that result from endless hard work, but all across India families are facing the same questions as more and more farmers' kids seek careers, urban lives, and something other than village life.

Towards (Actual) Human Unity

Lori remembers during her first trip meeting a number of foreign Aurovillians whom had never learned to speak the local Tamil language, despite living in the townfor decades. Is this is how you go about becoming a “living embodiment of an actual Human Unity”? Meanwhile, in a few short months of 2002, Lori and other students befriended some of the masons and other locals whom they worked with side by side each day in the red dirt of Auroville. Now it's time to go surprise Saktivel (SAK-thee-vel) and his family, in the adjacent village of Amalkulpam.

But in a small Auroville parking lot , we find it's much harder to haggle with the rickshaw driver who takes us there. He wants 80 rupees ($2) for a five-minute drive! As we all know, that's a total rip-off. Yet the reliable big-city tactic of walking away and approaching another driver doesn't work, as it requires there to be multiple rickshaws. Instead of a dozen guys sitting around there are two. Before we can even try to walk away, the other driver approaches us to say, “Whatever price this man tells you, you pay.” Doh! Are there anti-trust laws in this Utopian community?

We make it to the village, ask directions about forty times, and finally find his house. Saktivel, who spoke ok English in 2002, is not home. But his wife walks out and recognizes Lori! As before, she does not speak English and we don't speak Tamil. But their two kids have grown quite a bit and their English is very good. Chakarapani (CHAK-ra-pah-ni), age 13 and his sister Saranya (SAH-ran-ya), 11, are super-cool kids, and they take us on a tour of the village as we wait for their dad to return. Of course I can't help but compare them to my niece and nephew, Sean and Delia. I think the four of them would get along quite well...

Saktival is completely amazed when we get back. He says his wife tried to tell him that Lori, the American student who was here eight years ago, is walking around the village with his kids! How absurd! She must be joking. But soon they're catching up on old times. We learn that he stopped being a mason long ago, and in recent years has become somewhat of a holy man, to the point of creating a small "temple" for the Hindu god Hanuman in his house! As best we can understand, he has become a bit of a healer, and one very grateful villager gave him not one but two cows out of gratitude. Both are pregnant, and the more we talk inside their 10' x 15' home, the more it sinks in just how big a deal this is. A nearby piece of land platted for development includes a parcel for their new house. Once they build it, their old home will become a template full-time. Saktival and his family are moving up in the world!

He and the kids join us in our cab back to the guest house. As we drive through the night back into Auroville, I can't help but think about “human unity”. Our evening with the family, despite difficult communication and limited understanding, is still one of the best nights I've had in India so far. The kids are super-smart, engaging, and the whole family went out of their way to welcome us. They were so genuine and real and we were having so much fun, I hardly noticed just how “poor” they might seem compared to a middle-class US lifestyle. We were getting to know a great family and they were learning more about us. Is that not “human unity”, as basic as it can be?

Welcome to Auroville. May I Take Your Aura?

Cooking our own breakfast (and making our own coffee) is a treat, and enjoying it in Gaia's Garden is the tops! But it's time to see more of Auroville. Our rented bikes do the trick, although it's amazing that such horrendously heavy, ancient single-geared bikes can be pedaled anywhere. But we ride into "town" through the local village, constantly on the lookout for anything on the road bigger and faster than us. Even inside Auroville, Indian roads are Indian roads and nobody looks out for you!

We make it back to the beautifully constructed Visitor's Center for the first of some special reunions. In one of the shops that sells Auroville handicrafts (for real money, I must point out), Eshwari is still working there eight years later! When Lori and some of her fellow students weren't building their earth structure in 2002, they got to know her pretty well when visiting the store. They even visited her village. Lori walks into the shop and they recognize each other right away! We steal her away for a quick coffee and make plans to visit her house later in the week.

Then it's time to start the process of visiting Auroville's spiritual center, the unusual, strange and amazing building called the Matrimandir. First-time visitors can only view it from a distance (after watching a spacey video telling its story). So we go, thereby earning the right to return a few days later to make it inside.
 

After this glimpse of humanity's vessel towards a new Future, it's back to the past as we pedal to the American Pavilion to see what has become of Lori's handiwork from eight years ago...

Melting Away in Auroville

It's March 26th, and we are enjoying the bubble in India known as Auroville, even as we find ourselves melting in the heat and humidity! Auroville is an island of often frustrated but persistently idealistic foreigners (mostly), surrounded by an ocean of India. As we get settled in our new guesthouse, I find myself both intensely cynical yet openly curious about the place and the people who have devoted themselves to this experimental  “site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity” (an excerpt from the Auroville charter).

As usual, Wikipedia can summarize the place better than I. But if you had to pitch the concept in 60 seconds, perhaps you'd say it's a cross between a yoga commune, a college campus, the U.N. and summer camp, set in rural India. Devotees of India guru Sri Aurobindo (a genuinely fascinating figure whom I intend to learn more about) and his spiritual cohort, a Frenchwoman known as “The Mother” began the experiment in the late 1960's. Today Auroville has a population of about 2,000 people living in communities spread across the area, pursuing their research, creativity and passions with varying degrees of success. Speeding up the “next step in human evolution” is the ultimate goal, and who am I to criticize such grand ambitions? Well, there is a lot to criticize, but also much to admire. Most staggering to me is the fact that since 1968, the idealistic and hard-working pilgrims to Auroville have planted over two million trees in an area that had been almost entirely deforested.

(Auroville in the beginning)
This work continues, and as we biked around and explored for over a week on the dusty roads, we enjoyed the shade from their hard work.

The hardest-working fellow we've met is the owner of our guest house, dubbed “Gaia's Garden”. Kireet, (his Auroville-given name, not what he  was born with in his native Holland), can be found every morning in his beautiful gardens surrounding the guesthouse, working under the not-brutal-but-still-sweltering morning sun. Over many years he has transformed a patch of Auroville from a bare area into a lush and verdant setting. The guesthouse structures he built are likewise beautiful and fit perfectly with the surroundings. This was the escape from urban India we were looking for!

We don't get meals, but share a large kitchen with the other guests. But first it's off to the community store, where you don't spend money but rather use credit from your Auroville account. I think the goal is to operate a society that isn't based upon money, but to me spending our “Aurobucks” (my name for the system) was just like a debit card, as we deposited a few thousand rupees first. But whatever. We bought food and cooked out own meals - first time in a month! It's amazing how much you miss the basics sometimes...
 

Arriving in Tamil Nadu

After hopping the 6am Shatabdhi Express from Bangalore to Chennai (formerly known as Madras), we arrived to a very different coastal climate. In other words, it's super-hot here!! We headed from the train station via a hired car to Auroville. Along the way, we stopped to see the Shore Temple (a UNESCO World Heritage site) and rock-cut temples of Mamallapuram.
 

I had told Brian about my previous visit, about how cool it was to see temples cut into the rocks with monkeys running all over the place. Little did I know, the monkeys had developed a new habit: drinking soda from plastic bottles. We actually saw them trying to steal bottles from people's hands. The crafty monkeys would throw discarded bottles on rocks to break them open...don't they know how bad high fructose corn syrup is?!

Maybe you wonder, where do all of the plastic bottles come from? Why is there trash all over an ancient monument? Sadly, dear blog reader, many Indians do not appreciate the historical significance of the architectural and natural wonders in their country. We have seen graffiti inscribed on many monuments and historic trees ("Mahesh Loves Lakshmi!"), Diet Coke cans left on the floor of ancient palaces, empty snack bags dropped onto whatever temple floor was being walked across...it makes us sad.

Okay, now snap out of it! No more melancholy feelings, let's think about Lori's Birthday Celebration in Auroville and Pondicherry! We spent our first night in Auroville in the Sharnga Guesthouse which was a bit more rustic than we bargained for. The bathroom was basically outside meaning we shared it with some charming creatures (geckos, a family of frogs and a snail) and many not-so-charming (mosquitoes and palm-sized spiders). I don't like taking a shower and having to worry about whether or not I'll get bitten!! It was a lovely setting - there was even a small pool which Brian indulged in.
 
We rode bicycles around Auroville and ended up eating lunch at the Solar Kitchen, a communal kitchen where I ate many lunches during my last visit. It was not nearly as bland as I remember! We stopped by the Visitor's Center for a cool beverage and to check on whether or not my old friend Eshwari still worked there.  Luckily, she does!  More on her later...For dinner, we went into Pondicherry, a former French colony just down the road, and splurged at Le Dupliex. I was looking forward to drinking a chilled glass of white wine! When I saw lobster on the menu, my eyes lit up - I love crustaceans with butter. Instead of cake, we had a typical Pondicherry-style dessert called sangia, a coconut and jaggery (brown sugar) pudding with almonds. Delish!