Auroville
December 26th 1995
I was woken up at five the next morning by the evil ear-splitting screeching sound coming from the temple down the road, although i was so tired i managed to sleep through it, on an off, anyway. But i got up fairly early, although i didn't feel that great, and walked a couple of hundred yards up the road to the bike hire shop. They charged fifteen rupees a day to hire an old-fashioned, heavy framed, single gear bicycle - which is the standard bike you found everywhere in India in vast quantities. It seemed like a pretty reasonable price to me, so i hired one.
That morning i cycled back up to the visitors' centre. It was a nice ride, although the first part of the road from Periamudaliarchavadi was in terrible condition. But after that, it was pleasant cycling along the country lane, surrounded by trees all the way. Most of the way along the main road, which i'd walked along the night before, there was a bicycle track just off the road a bit, which was better than sharing the narrow strip of tar with cars, motorbikes and bullock carts.
This time the visitors centre was open and there were a lot of photos around the walls showing different aspects of life at Auroville and different stages in its history. There were also a few leaflets available in several different languages. I spoke to a man there who was giving information to people who wanted to stay or work at Auroville and he gave me some names of people to see who were working on the sort of things i was interested in - in other words, computer networks, sustainable agriculture and reforestation.
After i left the visitors centre, i cycled around a bit, enjoying the countryside, and then went to find a phone to try and call one of the two people involved in computer network stuff at Auroville. However, neither of them were there so i'd have to try again later.
I finally managed to catch Bobby, one of the computer network people, on the phone the next morning and arranged to go and see him the following afternoon. That left me with nothing particular to do for the next twenty four hours. I could have gone and checked out some of the other people whose names i had, but it seemed too complicated to be trying to deal with several people at once, so i decided to keep it simple and wait till after i'd seen Bobby to start chasing around after somebody else. After all, Auroville was spread out over about twenty square kilometres and some parts of it were a long way from others and a lot of it was a long way from where i was staying.
However, as a result of not having anything to do, i began to get that lost and aimless feeling coming back again. Normally i wasn't one of those people who felt like they had to be constantly doing something - to justify their existence - and i could quite happily do very little for long periods of time. But recently i seemed to have developed a need to be doing something constructive or creative or i'd start getting depressed and feeling my life was pointless, meaningless, and that i was wasting time. I think this was partly due to enforced inactivity that so much travelling had produced over a long period and partly due to the fact that since i'd been in India i didn't seem to have done anything that really made any sense of being there. I still didn't really know what i was doing there and in some ways i didn't really want to be there at all.
When i was in Huddersfield, i bought a book called "City of Woods and Fields", by Stephen Butler, for a pound from a cheap book shop. It was about a journey he did all over Britain in an ancient Morris Traveller van. He started in northern Scotland at a place whose name started with the letter 'A' and went from place to place, working his way through the alphabet, back and forth across the island until he got to somewhere beginning with the letter 'Z' in the extreme south west of England.
It was an interesting account and i enjoyed his weird english sense of humour and the overstated understatement of his narrative. Part of the reason it interested me was that at that time i was trying to write the part of this book which is about Britain, which was proving very difficult.
Anyway, towards the end of the journey his narrative got quite jaded and uninspired as he obviously became sick of it and began to wonder why he was doing it at all. I can see the same sort of tone creeping into this story - on and off, at least - and maybe parts of it don't make very exciting reading. However, it seems like that's an inevitable part of a journey like this and of a story that was being written while i was doing it. The worst of this will probably have disappeared when i've edited the manuscript later, but you'll just have to put up with the rest i'm afraid - if you want to finish reading it, that is! If bits of it are dull, it's because i was feeling dull at the time, and seeing as i'm writing this for you to read, you can share some of the suffering with me! Sorry about this, but i'll try not to suffer any more than i have to!