Auroville to Madras
January 5th 1996
Full Moon
The next morning i decided to ride into Pondy and change money. If the bandh was still on, i figured this would increase my chances at least. It also meant i could have some decent coffee and good food for breakfast. Everything was more or less back to normal in town and i didn't have any trouble changing money. The only signs that things were different were lots more police around than usual and when i cycled along the seafront there were lots of fishing boats a short distance out from the town.
When i got back to the guest house i decided to ride up to Auroville and say goodbye to Charlie and Georg. After that i took the bike back to the hire shop. It was really weird walking the couple of hundred yards from there to the Palms Beach. It felt like walking on land does when you've been at sea for a long time! But i gradually got my land legs back. I realised i'd hardly walked at all since i'd had the bicycle, which was nearly two weeks.
I was really glad to be getting out of the Palms Beach guest house, the place had begun to irritate me in a weird way. Nothing i could easily put a finger on, but a combination of the terrible food, sleeping in a room that was like a prison cell, being kept awake at night by people drinking and talking till late outside the window and being woken at five in the morning by the temple screeching probably contributed a lot to it. There were other minor things that annoyed me a bit about the place and, anyway, i'd been there nearly two weeks, which was a long time for me in one place!
After a ridiculously long journey on a series of buses, i finally arrived at Broadlands guest house at quarter to ten that night. Luckily they had one dorm bed - and i think it was the only one - apart from that, they were completely full up.
I went across the road and got a bottle of Haywards 5000 - a strong beer - and sat on the roof to drink it and look at the full moon.
It felt really great to be back in Madras - well, to be back at Broadlands, anyway. And it seemed impossible that it had been four weeks since i'd left there with Jenny to go to Senji for a couple of days. I couldn't believe two weeks had passed since i left Hampi either. The time spent at Auroville seemed to have gone in a flash. It was incredible - like i'd just snapped out of a trance or something. Although it hadn't really been a trance.
I didn't quite know what it was, but i thought that just having been doing things that interested me - although it was hard to put a finger on just what those things were - and spending time in a place that interested me, had been such a change that it was like a whole different reality. Now i'd walked back into the old reality again and, although it was good too, it didn't have much connection with the other place.
I suppose this is the time to explain a bit about Auroville. Well, it's a bit overdue, but better late than not at all...
It was founded in 1968 as a city for the future, based on the philosophies of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. He was an indian guru of some sort and she was a french woman, with north african parents, who lived around Pondicherry from the 1920s or 30s and was the main inspiration behind the founding of Auroville. I don't know anything else about either of them and the only thing i know of their beliefs is that they were anti-religion, which was a very definite point in their favour as far as i was concerned.
Anyway, Auroville consisted of over eighty small communities spread out over an area of about twenty five square kilometres, of which about ten were owned by Auroville. Within the Auroville area there were also a few Tamil villages and their lands. The place itself was kind of strange. It was very spread out and apparently disjointed. Although this wasn't unusual to me, as most of Australia was like that, but it must have been very confusing to most Europeans arriving there for the first time and trying to work out what was going on and where everything and everyone was.
In some ways, it reminded me of Canberra. There didn't appear to be anything there at all to most people who were used to normal, high-density type cities, because everything was spread out and scattered over a large area and there was a large amount of open country in the centre of the city itself. Darwin was pretty much the same.
Of course, Auroville wasn't anything like as big as either of those cities, as far as population goes, anyway. There were something like thirteen hundred residents of Auroville, and a fair proportion of those were foreigners. At the time i was there, there were also a few hundred guests, visiting the place for a while during a sort of tourist season that happens every year in January.
I'd heard a lot of opinions about Auroville from all sorts of people, in all sorts of places, and mostly from people who didn't really have any grasp of what was actually going on there. Or maybe people who'd seen a different aspect of it to what i saw. Most people seemed eager to slag it off. And most honest Aurovillians would be aware of a lot of bad aspects of the place too, but that's the same everywhere. I'm pleased to say i didn't experience any of the downside of Auroville at all while i was there. However, from experience with similar sorts of communities in Australia, i knew perfectly well it would be there if i wanted to look.
Auroville inspired me. What i saw there and the people i met there left me with an entirely positive impression. I wasn't silly enough to think that it was an unconditionally wonderful place, but at least people there were doing a large amount of work to make it, and the area around it, a better place. Anywhere where they'd planted so many trees in such a short time and in what was a deforested desert beforehand, couldn't be all bad. Even though most of those trees seemed to be australian natives, which were quite out of place in that environment. Well, not so much out of place in the environment, which is very like parts of Australia, as in that continent. However, much better the wrong trees than none at all. And anyway, people there were doing a lot of work towards restoring the native forest species which had been obliterated systematically by the british colonial powers over a very short period of time.
I was probably lucky to meet Charlie, who paid the non-resident local workers there well above the normal agricultural workers pittance, rather than one of the farmers who paid the normal rates. Although that's not to say that they're not doing good work as well. There certainly seemed to be a strong and healthy culture of alternative, environmentally sound agriculture there.
The computer network side there was interesting too - within a short time they would have had what would probably be one of the most advanced public-access internet connections in the whole of India, which for a fairly isolated, international community like Auroville should be a major benefit to a lot of people. And, don't forget, this was the mid 90s, when hardly anyone in the world had even heard of the internet - and practically nobody had access to a computer. I thought it would be good to maintain links with them through that medium when i was back in Australia, and to build links with other communities and individuals there who were working on similar things to what Auroville was doing.
All in all, i thought i found the things i needed to find. And it was probably good to get out while i still hadn't come across the things i wouldn't have liked. If i ever went back there some day i thought i'd probably come up against some of it then, but that's life, it's the same everywhere.