My perception changes when I arrive in India. The smell, the sounds, the slowness, the intuition, the acceptance, hope are wonderful things I see. Others may see stench, noise, inefficiency, irrationality and resignation to fate, despair. I think it is this other gaze that allows me to feel at ease in India.
So I have had quite wonderful experiences. I have learned that different people have different views of the same things. I learned by going from A to B and back to A and back to B…. It is day three of my adventure of becoming part of Auroville. I get up at 6:30 in the morning, when the birds sing loudly and merrily. I watch the young woman who picks flower buds in the garden for Shiva every morning to decorate the statue. Ganesha, too, receives an incense stick and an anointing with oil. Breakfast is wonderful, always freshly cooked, mildly seasoned. I read and think about Aurobindo.
By now I have a SIM card, a scooter too, and so I have ridden around Auroville a little. First to the library, then into the forest, lunch in the Solarkitchen.
So far I have found vegetarian food; you cannot buy alcohol here. Sometimes, though, you see a bottle of whisky by the roadside; there is certainly no supervision of that. I notice, however, that there are police huts at the road entrances to Auroville, but you also find these elsewhere throughout India, sometimes in the middle of an expressway, for example. It feels very colonial.
There is not much going on at the moment; the events list is manageable https://events.auroville.org.in/, and other things 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.
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