MMy perception changes when I arrive in India. The smell, the sounds, the slowness, the intuition, the acceptance, the hope are wonderful things that I see. Others may see stench, noise, inefficiency, irrationality and doom and despair. I think it is this different view that allows me to feel comfortable in India.
So I have had some wonderful experiences. I learned that different people have different perspectives on the same things. I learned by going from A to B and back to A and back to B ..... It's day three in my adventure to become part of Auroville. I get up at 6:30 in the morning and the birds sing loud and funny. I watch the young woman who picks flower buds from the garden every morning for Shiva to decorate the statue. Ganesha is also given a stick of incense and an oiling. Breakfast is wonderful, always freshly cooked and mildly spiced. I read and think about Aurobindo.
I now have a SIM card and a scooter too, so I drove around Auroville a bit. First to the library, then to the forest, lunch at the Solarkitchen.
So far I've found vegetarian food, you can't buy alcohol here. But sometimes you see a bottle of whisky by the roadside, there is certainly no supervision. However, I notice that there are police booths at the entrances to Auroville, but they can also be found all over India in the middle of a highway, for example. It feels very colonial.
There's not much going on at the moment, the event list is manageable https://events.auroville.org.in/ and what else you can do here can be found here https://www.auroville.com/blog/category/auroville. I am looking forward to the exhibition on Aurobindo and the SVARAM sound experiments.
