Auroville

Saturday 2 Jan 2010 Pondicherry: We had to switch hotels today due to a mix up in our reservations, but the new hotel is nicer anyway.  We took a taxi to Auroville, which is a community (almost a town, really) that was initiated by "the Mother", Sri Aurobindo's French spiritual co-conspirator.  (Was there any hanky-panky going on there?  I don't know).  It was built in the sixties and is still growing.  The residents are from all over the world.  It has a utopian vision, but I get the impression that utopia is a ways away still, like most (or all) such communities.  However, it is green and clean and into alternative energy, sustainable agriculture and alternative architecture.  They eschew religion, yet use a lot of religious terminology, so I think that they're a little inconsistent on that front.  They built a huge golden dome for meditation.  We could only see the outside, as the inside is reserved for meditation, not a tourist attraction.

Regarding the bovines who wander throughout Pondicherry, I can't stop wondering where they live.  Do they live outside and just trek into the city each morning to eat garbage, returning to their homes in the evening?  I will have to ask our yoga teacher tomorrow.

Our yoga teacher is Gujarati (so was Gandhi).  She told us that she doesn't go out much because she doesn't speak Tamil.  There are 27 different languages in India and something like 150 dialects.  It seems everybody here (except perhaps the lower castes) speaks at least 3 languages.  Some of the English is quite understandable to me.  It seems to be correlated with education level and economic class.  It is very difficult for me to understand most of the English I hear.  For instance, when I placed a room service order this afternoon, I wrote it down and walked my order to the front desk so that I wouldn't have to struggle to make myself understood over the hotel phone.

I had brought some short pants on the trip that had a ripped out seam.  There is a tailor who worked under an awning on the corner adjacent to our hotel.  I snuck over there with my pants and he stopped what he was doing and put them right on the sewing machine and fixed them in about 3 minutes.  The sewing machine was an ancient model powered by him pushing his feet back and forth.  It seemed to work very well, and left me wondering why we think we need electric motors in household sewing machines.  I gave him 50 rupees (about $1) and he was quite pleased. 

Paul and Sue are taking us out to dinner tonight in honor of our wedding anniversary.