Auro-what!?

We landed in Chennai without problem, and I said a fond farewell to Cammie as she headed home for a ten day family sojourn before retuning to ANET for a final 6 weeks - although she has lived in India all her life she still retains a French passport and so is warranted to undergo the same visa restrictions in place on the Andaman Islands as any foreigner staying for no more than 45 days at a time. I imperiously avoided the hectic and bedraggled streets of Chennai and resolved instead to head South toward Pondicherry for 6 days whist awaiting my flight from Bangalore some 8 hours West. A seriously local bus station brought me crashing back to the crushing stares of a hundred prying vouyers as I waited for a bus on hopeful information from a dubious director at the airport. As the beaten up old bus, displaying typically extensive battle wounds, flecking paint and absent windows, crested the horizon and plundered toward the lay-by entrance, a precipitous dash of bodies shoved me along and happily both myself and my backpack were resultantly held fortuitously upright by the wall of clamorous commuters. I even somehow managed to merit a seat for the 3 hour journey. With a backdrop of the lustrous setting sun illuminating the dusty road with unexpected beauty, I settled happily into my book and awaited Mamallapuram, a travellers haunt on the way to Pondicherry. I mainly stopped off as I was asleep on my feet, and as it turned out this relatively prosaic town scattered asunder with elderly tie dye garbed travellers and substandard touristic tat only held my attention for one brief evening anyway. So in the morning, after a fruitless wander to the dirty beach, I boarded another bus to head a further 3 hours South to Pondicherry and had decided to explore and reside in Auroville, an epicentre of international experimentation into social unification founded in the 60's by the mysterious 'Mother'.

                                                                                        Some surprisingly alright pictures from Mamallapuram

An unnerving Hindu effigy on the dirt
track to Auroville. Wasn't sure what
to make of it.

Inaugrated in 1968 by a gathering of some 124 nations and representatives from all Indian states, Auroville is the dream of French born Mirra Alfassa who either named herself or was bestowed the title 'The Mother' and followed in the footsteps of her Indian guru Sri Aurobindo throughout the 60's. The site was handed over to the democratic union of internationals and environmentally conscious 2,000 current inhabitants, although the initial estimations of Aurovillians in '68 was a whopping 50,000, with a view to become a global inspiration for a society based solely on love and sustainability as a place to "realise human unity". A confusing map I picked up from the Visitor's centre, a once futuristic now tired building nestled in a small gathering of hemp threaded clothing boutiques and white walled exhibition galleries of positive affirmations and tbe mother's preachings, denoted the various little factions of Auroville all bestowed various positive and perhaps contrived titles such as Certitude, Perseverenve and Kindness. To be honest, if I were to have conceived of a haven of environmental green living, I would have built its neighbouring establishments much closer together, as the sparse and sporadic nature of the various hippy communes were several kilometres apart along difficult dirt tracks encouraging residents and visitors alike to make use of the many surrounding motorbike hire stalls to make a full exploration. I initially resolved to waft carelessly around on a bicycle, but the proximity from my dormitory on the outskirts of the commune to its centre, and the requirement to head 16km back into Pondicherry to receive a series rabies jabs made this a bit of a pipe dream. So I rented a small motorbike, checked my mirrors (or more accurately mirror singular as the left one had fallen off), tightened my laces, and tried not to think of my carbon footprint.

My slow little bike and I trundled merrily to town enjoying the cool wind against my skin as opposed to the searing midday heat and rivulets of sweat I would be suffering with had I rented a bicycle. Pondicherry has a small and diverse centre of several disecting busy commercial roads selling reams of milk sweets, fruits, fish, watches, saris and books. In the more tranquil North of the town, with its calm wider streets, was nestled the french colonial quarter comprised of neat little buildings adorned with crumbling palid walls, iron wrought window guards and pretty street signs reading rue rather than road. I had a consultation with a friendly female doctor in a private hospital and bought jab one of 3 to fight any harbouring virus from the dog bites, before returning 3 days later for the second installment at the unbelievably crowded and dilapidated public hospital under its collapsing roof and flaking painted walls amidst hundreds of hot and sweaty visitors sitting bare footed against the walls in huge ever growing ques.

Bizarrely, a portly civilian laden himself with my situation and made it his duty to rush me past the hundreds of women queuing to my abject embarrassment, however this whole fiasco resulted in several trips up and down the stairs as noone knew what slip of paper I needed scribbling on by what overworked GP for which overcrowded department before the rabies nurse left at 10:30am. Anyway, long, hectic story short, I was jabbed after a small school uniformed girl in looped plaits and awaited my final installment in Laos.

The following three pictures were sourced from the
extensive Google achives as cameras are
predictably not permitted beyond the gate

Back along the dual carriageway out of town and down a random, inconspicuous and under signposted little track at Auroville I had booked in for a 'concentration' at the esteemed Matri Mandir, a giant gooden orb which supposedly constitues the spiritual and structural centre of Auroville, a "symbol of the Divine's answer to Man's aspiration for perfection". An ambitious blue print of artistic community buildings on display at the town hall fanned out from around the central golden 'pupil' like the outer contours of a giant psychedelic eye as perceived from aerial view in plans and models, but in actuality developments are still very much embryonic if not currently unstarted and not a single building currently stands to realise this innovative design proposed in the 1960s. Much like many of the righteous environmental measures which have been professed since Auroville's inception, such as a huge water purification pipe running from the sea several kilometres away, electric car transportation and several other outlandish recycling schemes. The Matri Mandir is an enormous golden ball, a building that was alledgedly envisioned by the Mother in some lucid trance, and is comprised of 2,000,000 gold leafed mosaic pieces arranged onto hundreds of small and large discs which cover its imposing spherical outside. Orchestrated entry was only permitted after sitting through a 25 minute short film about the origins of Auroville, which skimmed over functional information such as the achievements of the organisation, the funding structure and survival, the funding of the opulent Mantri Mandir or the school curriculum and oppourtunities for young people, all lost in a flimsy and garralous superfluity of professed creativity and free will which to me seemed devoid of any certifiable evidence of what Aurovillians actually do. The anciet and eccentric British guide Gary, a die hard Aurovillian resident, showed us through the lush and marvellous extremely well-kempt gardens of the Matri Mandir, which were nurtured abundantly by lavish diurnal spray systems from a never ending supplies of water. It was odd to me that the buildings were strewn so distantly from one and other requiring the running of a petrol powered machines bobbing dangerously over unmarked, coverted speed bumps no one had got round to painting for the safety of the inhabitants, yet many Indian workers were hired to maintain the decadence of the one central garden. However, one is gravely forbidden from entering the park for recreation, perhaps reading under the enormous and beautiful Banyan tree to the North of the Matri Mandir, unless one holds an Aurovillian resident card. During a run in with a guard during such an attempt a snooty young mother rebuked common travellers for our trespassing. And even residents are not even permitted to enjoy the lushious grassy and shaded respite of the garden at their free will without prior notice to the gate guard during short, specific preordained intervals throughout the day.

Anyway, the Matri Mandir is definitely, categorically not a place of worship for herself, her values, or any devotional religious or secular constructs as profanely professed by the Mother herself. Howeeeever, Matri Mandir by direct translation does perplexingly mean Mother Temple. Our guide explained that the golden casing really did very little to maintain the cool interior of the ball as many mistakenly think, and is in fact purely for aesthetics. Similarly, the 12 towering columns in the central room which do not quite meet the root, are actually not for structural integrity of the centre and are an unknown and mysical addition simply seen by the Mother in her transcendental trance. 12 is a very sacred or perhaps more accurately salient number in the Aurovillian cult or tradition, although references to the numerical networks and patters of these importqnt numbers were brief and underdeveloped. Upon entering the completely silent Disney's Epcot-esque golfball you were in the centre of the cavernous space aglow with frivilous and futuristic walls of red hued back lighting which climbed the impressive walls like a convincing set of Star Wars. Guided by sentinel speechless old hippys dotted at various intervals we were directed to remove our shoes and don thick white socks to ascend one of the entwining and spiralling helix staircases into the central chamber.

The central concentration hamber

A prestine enormous and minimal dark cave, which embellished the spacey Millenium falcolm ambiencemof the place, had at least 40 meditation spots extending out around a central skylight which gave way to a beam of sunlight that shone directly down through a prodigious glass orb that scattered reflections of the clouds across the hazy survace of a white plateau which then trickled the light down under the enormous golden ball to a smaller crystal in the middle of a white water feature underneath. The large mixed group of tourists of sat for 15 minutes in either quiet, disiplined meditation or disinterested uncomfortable slants observing the silence broken monumentally by the smallest sniffle or most clandenstine cough which sent sound waves echoingly menacingly around the space. The floor was covered in a thick, white cushioned carpet, hence the bizarre socks and stern instruction to deter from prostrations particularly if harbohring painted bindis as they'd found these murderous to remove in the past.

12 outer petal rooms named after various meritorious attributes radiated out around the ball providing other rainbow coloured space age rooms to sit and meditate in during prebooked concentrstion sessions which I heard were less bizarre than the group induction. Being in the central chamber had had an adverse anarchic effext on me producing a dastardly desire to sprint and dive roll over the big light crystal purely to stir and see the abhorrence from the eldery guarding residents. I desperately sought a park or communal grassland to sit and read or hula hoop in the following day, but aside from the scrupulously maintained Matri Mandir garden, locals of 3 and 30 years could not managed to guide me to such a place as they absent mindely searched the recesses of their cloudy memories for places of communal congregation, nor seemed phased at its absence. I chanced across the botanical gardens, a forgotten tangle of scrub land and faded, ghostly signs which once displayed a visitors' trail, plant properties and latin derivatives when the dream of aauroville was new and vibrant. The devilish desires returned as some other visitors in my dormitory and I consired breaking into the main gardens and enjoy the soft grass at sunset in protest of the Draconian and esoteric regulations. I was vying for a well-timed streak of defiance, but we resolved to abstain as, although we were leaving in the morning, one girl aspired to stay for longer and volunteer her time so we relented on her behalf. 

In the evenings we gathered fruits and exquisite bakery items for extensive communal feasts and fruit salads, and I hooped the nights away with two Slovak enthusiasts with whom I exchanged many tricks to the soundtrack of guitar mastery from incredibly talented Israelis and Indians.

Melina and me

A little bit disillusioned toward the end of my stay in the furtive Auroville with its unremitting residents, I did however merit a disgracefully cheap dentist check up and polish with a reputable Indian dentist for 280 rupees, or the equivalent of a meagre £3. So whilst Auroville was comprised of the unimpressively elitist confluence of a cultish cohort with a cloudy concept, I found a great dentistry service, and the deals in some ways inspiring. Plus several of the delightful debauchees from my dormitory will be attending Boom in Portugal so the saga continues...