Arriving in Auroville

My 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, and you can't buy alcohol here. Sometimes you see a bottle of whiskey by the side of the road, there's certainly no supervision. However, I notice that there are police houses at the entrances to Auroville, but you see those all over India in the middle of highways from time to time, for example. This 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.