India - Pondicherry and Auroville

“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”  -Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

We woke on the morning of the third day feeling like we’d slipped through a time/space dimensional wormhole and ended up in foreign universe where, after 2 days that felt like 2 months, we were finally getting used to our new lives – a lifestyle dictated by car horns, mosquitos, and AC.  Travel does funny things to time. 

But we also had something new to look forward to: today we were leaving for our homestay in our destination for the next 2 months of our trip: Auroville!

You may be thinking to yourself, or asking your spouse/roommate/Chinese pen pal, “What the hell is Auroville?”  Well, scoot your stools a bit closer to the computer while I weave you a yarn of intrigue, India, and Hippies:

The Spiritual Leader of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram (after Sri Aurobindo himself died in 1951) turned out to be a French Jewish Woman who went by the title of “The Mother”.  Needless to say, she was a pretty potent spiritual presence, having risen through the ranks to head a full-blown Ashram as a white woman in the 50s.  Anyways, she had a vision of an “International Township”, a community “Free of the limitations of Religion, Creed, Ethnicity”, where the freedom of Spiritual Community would shower all of its glory upon the Earth and people of every type and color could bathe in it together.  It was the 60s – 68 when they held the inauguration ceremony, and the first settlers, or “pioneers”, started showing up.  The story goes, when they were trying to figure out where to build it, the Mother said, “Bring me a map”, then proceeded to point to a spot, about 12 KM from the city of Pondicherry in an arid red-earth desert plateau, and said, “Build it Here.”  And in that exact spot where she pointed, they found a lone, 100-year-old banyan tree, which is now the geographic center of Auroville.  The girl had clout.  So they erected a giant golden meditation sphere – the Matrimandir (more on that later) – and started to move in. 

The Mother was a total Boss.

Almost 50 years later, and Auroville has a population of 2400 permanent residents with a seasonal influx of over 4000 volunteers and visitors.  Residents (called “Aurovillians”) live in over 120 different “settlements”, kindof like micro-communities, ranging in form and style and living arrangements from ecovillages to cohousing communities to farms to yoga centers, each autonomous and unique, all spread out over about 24 square kilometers.  It’s a “cash-free” economy, meaning that when you’re within the Auroville township limits (a 1 km diameter circle encompassing the largest and mainest buildings), no cash transactions are allowed – instead, everyone uses a complicated account system with electronically tracked transactions with a kind of spiritual charge card.  Outside of the center, most places accept cash (especially if they don’t have the special card reader). 

There is a pretty dense hierarchical government system consisting of a multiplicity of vaguely defined councils, committees, working groups, subgroups, subcouncils, and subcommittees, all adding up to a pretty decent acronym alphabet soup.  These “committees” make all the decisions about housing, land, infrastructure, grant distribution, and much more, including who is or isn’t accepted as an “Aurovillian” (the entry processes is notoriously painful).  No individual persons own their own land or buildings within Auroville. 

The Auroville Master Plan.  Note: not scaled to reality.

If it all sounds kindof strangely bureaucratic (and oddly familiar) for a spiritual intentional community in India – we thought so too.  Especially because our first day in Auroville consisted of no fewer than 3 hours of waiting in lines, filling out forms, handing over money to people behind desks, signing receipts, photocopying our passports, and generally being bored.  What is with Westerners and their love of RED TAPE!  It seems like the Westerners here – who make up no less than 5/6 of the community here, but probably more – have brought their own ways of thinking, organizing, managing, planning, and structuring.  Not to say that there isn’t a little Indian flare to it – like everything running minimum 30 minutes behind, and the 40% chance that the office you’re trying to get in to is closed for lunch. 

The racial boundaries are pretty striking.  Outside the immediate Auroville area, the percentage of non-Indian people is barely 1%.  Once you make it into Auroville’s borders, and it suddenly jumps to 50%.  And if anyone could separate the Aurovillians from the visitors, guests, tourists, and most of all, the laborers, you’d surely find the proportion close to 90%, if not higher.  Auroville is in fact a highly exclusive community, oriented towards Westerners, and White Westerners at that.  Disappointing, really, that the dream of a “Universal township” where all people are accepted still only applies to educated, wealthy, privileged White people who can afford to buy the organic produce and live off their secondary incomes while they enjoy their "spiritual" retirement community.

But all of those issues (which I already mostly knew about from my last trip to Pondicherry, where I dabbled with but never lived in Auroville) aside, I knew we wouldn’t be able to stomach Pondicherry for 2 whole months, so Auroville seemed like the best place to get a more fulfilling, quieter, and cheaper long term arrangement.  We had picked out a Homestay rental for our first month of accommodations in Auroville through the guest house website: from the pictures, it looked like a little 2-story house with a small kitchen and terrace downstairs, bedroom upstairs, unattached bathroom with a shower (and hot water heater!) and Indian-style squat toilet.  Home sweet home!  Plus, only 500 rupees (~$8) per day for the two of us.  Not bad for me and Aphyna’s first home together J  Were so excited to meet the house in person!

The 12 KM taxi ride to Auroville gave us another chance to appreciate the complexity (and sheer terror) of Indian driving.  In between bouts of prayer and acceptance of our lives coming to a swift conclusion at the business end of a bus, we contemplated the language of honking – in India, the only way the traffic functions is through a complex communication system that uses the tools drivers have at hand: honking.  As long as motorbikes, scooters, cars, trucks, and buses are on the road – 6 AM to 11 PM every day – you’ll hear constant honking on the street.  But people aren’t honking out of aggression or frustration – in fact, it’s often quite the opposite.  It’s out of goodwill, warning, and reassurance – Yes, I’m here, heads up, watch out now, here I come!  It’s hard not to cringe when someone honks right behind or next to you, as we’re so conditioned to considering a honk a personal attack on our sanity and worthiness as a driver (and, by association, as a human being); but we’re starting to get used to it.

We finally made it to the “settlement” containing our homestay – Utility – and met our landlord, Ben, an older guy (probably in his mid-60s) who if I had to guess I would say is Dutch.  He showed us a lot of kindness right away – he showed us around the house (even more beautiful and serene and super cute than we were hoping!), checked the gas burners (and showed us how to turn them on) and made sure there was enough propane in the tank (most burners are fueled by massive refillable propane tanks, like a barbeque grill – no gas lines in India!), and even passed on the card of a scooter rental guy about 20 minutes walking from our place.  He encouraged us to go there first, cuz we had a lot of red tape to cut through if we were gonna make it in Auroville – we had to register as guests, which meant showing up at 3 PM sharp at the Town Hall with Passports in hand and a signed note from Ben with the details of our stay, then a trip to Financial Services to open Guest Accounts and get our Aurocards charged up with a few thousand rupees so we could buy things within the Auroville town limits. 

Our little Homestay away from Home - That's the house on the right!

Aphyna relaxing hard-core on the terrace

Our neighbor's cat Itchy gettin into it too 

Long story short, we did it.  And we met a few characters along the way: the guy who rented us the scooter, like an extremely chipper young Tamil guy (probably 17 or 18) who spoke great English but at approximately 1.8x the speed of even an American teen girl, who finished lunch early and reassembled our scooter once he realized we were just going to sit there and wait for him to finish his lunch.  We met other young people of various origins – Australian, French, Brazilian – waiting in line to register as guests, all staying for various amounts of time.  We tried to pick up some good hints of where to go for food, events, classes, workshops – we spent a good 20 minutes standing at the message board scribbling notes into our notebooks with places, times, e-mail addresses, phone numbers.  There was a lot to take in – everything from Tamil cooking classes to Aikido to a Farmers Market to Lomi Lomi Massage – and we were pretty stoked to see what would happen.  A lot can happen in 2 months in Auroville!

By the time we finished, we were starving.  There’s nothing like bureaucracy to drain your energy reserves.  We had a snack at the visitors center – pretty tasty smoked tofu sandwiches with olive spread, all made (even the bread) in Auroville processing units, and waited for the Solar Kitchen to open – the main staple cafeteria-style food center of Auroville.  It’s called the solar kitchen because of the solar cooking stove which heats the water for the steam pressure cookers, or something like that.  The point is, it’s all you can eat, pretty high quality food, and they source a lot of produce from Auroville farms – rp200 (~$3) a pop.  Not bad, especially when it isn’t crazy packed, as we would come to discover it is for lunch, with Aurovillians and Tourists alike.

Our trusty little Scooty steed

Driving around Auroville is really beautiful...

...as long as you dodge the cows - this one is surprisingly NOT in the middle of the road

After finishing our meals, we were exhausted, and we had our first drive home in the dark, through the village of Kuilapalayam which separates our community, Utility, from the Solar Kitchen and the main center of Auroville.  Our first day in our new home; there was magic in the air that evening, but we were too tired to do anything but bask in it.  Our new life was beginning!

Our bedroom - very cozy, as Aphyna is so gracefully demonstrating

One positive about having our internal clocks reset: we love waking up with the dawn, hearing the first birds start their calls, replacing the buzzing chirps of insects.  I love watching the sky turn from black to grey to brown to pink and gold to blue.  I love the peace and solitude of our little home.  I love rolling out of bed, going downstairs, and eating FRESH BANANAS AND COCONUTS!!  Not just those long, boring Cavendish bananas we get in the US, but all different colors and shapes: tiny short and fat yellows, medium thick greens, plump reds.  And there’s nothing like cracking a fresh coconut to wake you up at dawn.  I love reading in the morning, meditating, stretching, doing quiet things.  If only there weren’t so many dang mosquitos!  Small price to pay for the most peaceful mornings of our life – we just suck it up and slather on the DEET-free repellant (which Aphyna has taken to spraying directly at them like a weapon).

Crackin coconuts like it's my job!

Now this is a fruit salad - bananas, cocounts, and coconut milk!

Here’s a brief breakdown of our schedule this week: 

4:30 – 5:30 AM – Wake Up

5:30 – 6:30 AM – Read, Stretch, Meditate, Set Intentions, Affirmations, Etc.

6:30 – 7:30 AM –Breakfast – Fruits, Nuts, Smoothies, Tea, Etc.

7:30 – 9:30 AM – Whatever time: morning Yoga, writing, crafting, painting, more reading, etc.

9:30 – 10:30 AM – Brunch – Bigger Meal: toast and PB, rice and dal (lentil soup) and pickles,

yogurt, etc.

10:30 – 1:30 – Whatever time part II – visit Auroville, buy groceries, run errands, etc.

1:30 – 2:30 PM – Supper – The biggest meal of the day, for sure: some home-cooked Indian

veggies, curry, rice, yogurt, cucumber/tomato/mung bean sprout salad, sandwiches, tofu – all kinds of good stuff!

3:30 – 4:30 PM – Nap

4:30 – 8:00 PM – Whatever part III – Auroville visits, exploring the village and looking at cool

shops, buying more groceries, visiting the bakery, etc.

5:30 – 7:30 PM – Snacks if necessary – fruits, nuts, etc.

8:00 – 9:30 PM – Sleep

So far it’s a great schedule – it keeps us fresh and lively!  I feel healthier and cleaner than I have in a long time.  We'll see how long it lasts!

Stay tuned for next week, when we'll fill you in on all our Auro-Escapades!