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.

Getting ready to leave for Pondicherry

Morning, Wednesday 30 Dec. 2009, Radisson Hotel, Chennai: It is a very strange conversion that the world has gone through over the last 100 years or so. Here at the Radisson Hotel Catherine and I go to breakfast, and the staff are impeccably dressed, with the men in nice suits and ties and the women in nice pantsuits. Meanwhile, nearly all of the the guests are dressed casually. I am sure that the clothing that the staff are wearing costs much more than the clothing of the people that they wait on. I doubt if that was true 100 years ago. How did that happen? I guess that the people with disposable income had the freedom to choose comfortable clothes and the people who were striving for disposable income were required to wear formal clothes in their service industry jobs. It's kind of strange. On first impulse you would expect the wealthier folks to wear the better clothes.

In addition, the staff of the hotel seem very cultured, whereas my country bumpkin demeanor is somewhat embarrassing even to myself. "Hey Verne, rustle me up 'nuther cup of that java over here, will ya?". Our driver yesterday told me that he speaks 5 languages: Tamil, Hindi, Nepali, English and Bengali, and he's working on Japanese. Much of the English is difficult for an American to understand, and it is difficult for them to understand our English as well. The Indians speak English between themselves across their own cultural divides, such as when a Tamil speaker is speaking to a Hindi speaker. Ironically, English is the language that unifies this country. They have their old colonial master (Britain) to thank for that.

Part of the discomfort here is that when I am India (or any other developing economy), I live like the upper class, but I am not upper class by any stretch of the imagination, so it just doesn't feel right. This whole class thing makes me squirm. It's a game whose rules I don't understand. I don't know how to dress. I don't know how to behave. I don't know how much to tip. When I tip, maybe it insults the service person because the tip is too small or maybe my tips are inappropriately too large, thereby inadvertently creating some other transgression.

I have a theory that the world is composed of two types of people, those focused on form and those focused on function. Catherine is the former, I am the latter. Catherine never has problems with class or dress or proper behavior. But I am better at fixing the computer or the plumbing and making the investments and paying the bills.

Later on today we take a taxi to Pondicherry, the home of the great Indian saint Sri Aurobindo, (1872 - 1950) whose name I am quite familiar with but whose books I have never actually read. We plan on doing yoga and meditation there every day. We'll be staying outside their ashram, as they didn't have any rooms available when we made reservations. Pondicherry was ruled by the French from 1816 to 1954, so I think French may be more prominent than English there.