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...