Auroville - 2
December 27th 1995
The following afternoon i cycled up to the Centre for Scientific Research, where Bobby worked. It was right on the other side of Auroville and it must have taken at least half an hour to get there. It was a pleasure cycling around Auroville although there wasn't an amazing amount to see except trees. Most of the roads were fairly rough dirt tracks but it was almost completely flat so it was the perfect place for bicycles. Lots of people zoomed around the place on motorbikes and mopeds, but i much preferred cycling as it was more peaceful and relaxing, as well as not producing any pollution. And you got to see a lot of things that motorbike riders never would, because of the slower speed and also the lack of noise, which scares away wild animals. As well as that, i desperately needed the exercise. The long months of physically destructive travelling, the period of illness, which i still hadn't really recovered from, and the hours spent sitting in front of a computer had combined to make me less fit than i remembered being for a very long time.
Meeting Bobby was interesting. He was working on a public access computer bulletin board system that was available to Auroville residents for sending e-mail to each other or, via Internet, to people all round the world. They were running the same software as our BBS in Melbourne and were working on a very similar project in a similar way. I offered my help, if there was anything i could do in the small amount of time i was going to be in the area and we agreed to meet up again the following week.
From there i cycled a couple of kilometres to a farm called "Aurogreen" to try and find Charlie, who was one of the names on my list. When i got there, he was milking a cow and he told me to come back the following morning and he'd show me round the place.
When i went back again Charlie wasn't around, so i just sat in the shade and waited for him to show up. The simple pleasure of sitting on the roughly made stone bench, under a shady tree, in the warmth of the tropical morning, surrounded by trees and with nothing much to look at except three or four cows lying under another tree, is hard to express. But that sort of feeling was one of the most important things i'd been missing since i'd left Australia.
Really the only time i'd been away from tarred roads and cars had been those few days at the organic farm in Penang, all those months ago. But over the last seven years i'd become so accustomed to spending a large proportion of my life in that sort of environment and this had become something that was almost a physical need for me. I'd go crazy if i was away from it for very long. And by the time i got to Auroville i was certainly well on the way to going completely certifiably mental! Sitting under that tree was a kind of occupational therapy.
After a while, Charlie showed up and he kept his promise to show me around the place. He'd been at Auroville for something around 20 years and growing fruit trees there for most, if not all of that time. As well as fruit trees and the small herd of cows, there was a small vegetable garden, some chickens and a few small patches of timber trees and bamboo big enough to build with. Among the fruit trees at different times, they grew black gram - a lentil-type legume - which they sell and grass which they feed to the cows.
The farm was divided up into topes - or fields - which were fenced with thorny bushes. The layout of these topes seemed strange to me at first. Each tope was divided up into padis - which were separated from each other by eight or ten inch high earth walls for irrigation purposes. Water running down a concrete and brick channel into each tope could be diverted, via earth channels running the length of the tope, into individual padis and allow selective irrigation of whatever needed water at any particular time. Generally there would be one tree in each padi.
It was interesting to see this irrigation system in action, as i'd never seen it close up before. I couldn't really say what the advantages and disadvantages would be compared to the plastic pipe sort of system that i'm more used to. It's probably less efficient, in terms of limiting water wastage, but it's probably cheaper to construct - although the quantity of bricks and cement used in it make me wonder about that. However, plastic pipe has a limited useable life before it's got so many leaks you can't repair it any more and the type of channel system they had there would probably, with a bit of maintainence, last a lot longer. Anyway, the plastic agricultural pipe probably wasn't available when they'd set it up, and quite likely still wasn't.
After he'd showed me round, i told Charlie i was interested in doing a bit of work on the farm while i was around and he said to come back on Monday morning and i could help with pruning the trees.