Oh yeah wow sun!

the train from Delhi down to Chennai was, of course, beautiful. the green just kept getting lusher and the broad banana leaves more plentiful as we hurtled down closer to the equator than i'd yet been. asap we got from chennai to pondicherry to auroville.

auroville is a trip.

after the extremely muggy air in rishikesh where nothing ever dries it was totally blissful, man, to spend 4 sunny days and 5 starry nights in a bamboo shack right on la playa. the place is called repos and is presided over by bhaga, a french ex-pat who works as a cafe manager, guest house operator, house putter-upper, and international spiritual researcher and lecturer.

seems like everyone in auroville gets to be a bricoleur of their choosing. marx said that 'after the revolution,' people'd be free to fish in the morning, write in the afternoon, and go bowling at night, or something like that. well they didn't wailt 'til 'after' here. auroville definitely has a utopian vibe to it and bhaga says its an experiment based on furthering the positive evolution of the human species. founded in '68 (it would...) auroville started when people from every state in india and over 100 other nations brought a handful of earth from their neck of the woods and mixed it all together in that urn-type-thing on the little peak in the right of the pic. below, 1/2 down.


(i stole this pic)

and that big gold golf ball... you meditate in it. there's a round chamber that's lit when a mirror reflects a shaft of light straight down to this big crystal ball which then radiates all over the room. its covered in a mosaic of 2 million pieces of gold pressed between glass. and those 2 million tiles, said the tour guide, were "made in that building over there with the blue door," which was TINY. took 5 years. yikes stripes.

'course to some degree the group of people who get to work the job of their choice and all that, the 'aurovelians,' is an elite group that excludes the surrounding fishing villages which have big problems with water shortages, etc. we did hear of a school for people with and without disabilities that aurovelians were working to set up that sounded pretty phenomenal.

besides the scrumptious breakfasts (idly, coconut chutney, sambar, amaaaaaazign croissants, muffins, dark dark dark coffee, musli and curd, bananas, hibiscus flower jam (!), pineapple juice, etc.) and dinners at the community kitchen and the lunches i'll never forget at the cafe (salads! ahhhh i missed salads soooo much. they had fresshhh locally grown tomatoes, avocados, cucumbers, greens, cheeeeese, nuts, dried berries, etc.), and swimming in the ocean, the best part of auroville was renting mopeds and getting lost all over the town, which has the shape of a spiral galaxy.