Sun, sea and an Ashram in Pondicherry
Trip Start
Nov 04, 2007
1
27
62
Trip End
May 03, 2008
Pondicherry,
India
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Got to Pondi ok - not done anything yet but get here and check into a very nice Ashram guesthouse looking over the sea (it has a cat. We think it bodes very well for a place to have a cat - all the best places in SE Asia had at least one. No where so far in India has had one...coincidence? We think not... ;) )
Update 25th January
Ros:
Some people have commented that our blogs from SE Asia consisted mainly of talk about food. We felt that maybe our India blogs were neglecting the food issue somewhat, so in an effort to give a true reflection of our time here, here is a typical day in Pondicherry for us..
Park Guest House and garden
.7.30am - wake up...mmm...breakfast time....shower, get dressed and toddle off to the guest house cafe. Normally have masala omlettes, fruit and yoghurt and tea. Maybe buy some home-made biscuits in case we get the munchies later.
9am - back to our room, lounge about for a bit, reading
10am - go for a wander around town. Mmm...is it lunch time yet?
12pm - lunch - often in one of the Indian vegetarian cafe/restaurants along the seafront where we'll get some chappattis, a curry dish and something to drink for about a pound.
2pm - cake on the way home.
3pm - lounge about in the guest house gardens for a while reading. The grounds are really very pretty and green and lush, with the sea crashing onto the rocks on just the other side of the wall and sea eagles circling overhead
Roz eating cake at the seafront cafe
. There are little ponds full of frogs and fish and often chipmonks leaping between the palm trees. There are also a lot of crows. Crows seem to be a feature of India.5pm - pop to internet cafe for coffee and cake.
6pm - go find somewhere for dinner - usually another Indian restaurant where we'll have masala dosas for about 50p each. We might treat ourselves to some Indian sweets for later.
8pm - return to guest house to lounge about, eat sweets and read a bit more.
So not much emphasis on food there then. Ahem.... ;)
Auroville
We have managed to rouse ourselves enough to go on a little excursion to a place called Auroville, just outside Pondicherry. We are staying at Park Guest House, which is run by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram - which seems to have a hand in a great deal in Pondicherry. Started by Sri Aurobindo Ghosh and some French lady they call 'The Mother', the Ashram, its associated buildings, educational centre and various guesthouses are really a focal point here
Seafront at Pondicherry
. However, not content with spending her life meditating in the gardens of the Ashram, The Mother had a vision of starting a utopian state, which could be claimed by no one nation and where everyone could live together in harmony whilst seeking out their spiritual souls. Or something like that. So it was to Auroville, the beginning of this utopian paradise, where we took a tuk tuk this morning. And my, was it wierd.
We tried our hardest not to be hard-nosed cynics. We really did. We tried to understand the wonderful spiritual things that were written around the walls of the information centre, and we even watched both videos. We took in the lovely filmed footage of children of many different nationalities skipping through the lush countryside, that had been transformed from leached wasteland only a few decades ago, and we appreciated the range of different industries, arts and crafts the inhabitants undertake.
However, we have a few questions that we just don't seem to have found answers for. Firstly, the premise of the city is that people of all nationalities, castes etc can live together in harmony. Yet there is a selection procedure to actually get in
Matrimandir, Auroville
. So actually, it's all the people of any nationality/caste etc who meet the criteria of being sufficiently spiritual and willing to put aside their prior material existence - the very existence that, presumably was responsible for them getting to the threshold of spirituality that would allow them to enter Auroville. Hmmm...Secondly, once these enlightened people get to Auroville, and pay their entry fee (oh yes, you have to donate the equivalent sum of a return airfare to your country of origin, and pay your own way for at least your first year until they decide whether to accept you properly), who then decides what is what? The videos made it sound a little communist, except with a hefty dose of spiritualism and no mention of peasant farmers. So what about power? And politics? Apart from the tenets of ways to reach spiritual fulfilment (which included working for the common good), there seemed little information on how this new, brave society would actually function. Which seemed either naive, or as if they were hiding something.
Thirdly (and finally, although we could keep asking questions for a while yet), the society seemed to be striving for self-containment, yet they mentioned that for the 2000 people living there (1200 adults) they had created 5000 jobs for local people
By popular demand ..... Hugh and Roz!
. In other words, they were a very long way from being self-contained or self-sufficient and many, if not all of the Indian people we saw tending the well kept gardens and building the pathways were probably just drafted-in labour who carried on living their lives in much the same way as they always have, complete with all the inequalities and prejudices of the big wide world. Auroville would be a wonderful anthropological study we're sure - the concerted efforts of a group of people from across the world to establish an entirely new society. However, we felt that the reality was not as neutral as the promotional videos would like to expound, and in fact the majority of Aurovillians were probably middle class intellectuals who had dropped out of their 'home' societies for a while, and would probably return to them eventually when the cracks started to show in the perfect facade. And what a facade Auroville wants to portray - in the video we saw a galaxy-swirled city emanating from a central 'Matrimandir' (that looked like a gold golf-ball and contains a central white chamber for finding your soul, that we weren't allowed to see into). The visitors centre, complete with little expensive boutiques selling things made in the city (printed silk clothes, pottery, candles and the like) was all pristine, the gardens were impossibly green with amazing bright flowers and the pathways were swept free of the normal detitrious of Indian life. But we didn't actually get to see the majority of the place! Visitors were kept firmly to the visitors area. We would have liked to wander around the accommodation area, where cute little futuristic houses nestled, populated by happy families who all practiced yoga and danced and painted whenever the mood took them. We would have liked to see some of the 'industrial' areas where the commercial activity took place. We would like to have seen the central canteen that feeds all 2000 inhabitants on the power generated from a massive solar basin in the roof. But alas, we were allowed to wander around the carefully stage-managed tourist centre and no further. So our questions remain unanswered and Auroville remains as opaque as if we had seen no more than the entry in the guidebook.
