India and Auroville

India's a beautiful beast. Aurovill, the spiritual community outside of Pondicherry is about 5 kilometers in diameter. It is located in an environment of tropical dry evergreen forest land, long chopped down and water sucked to pumped for year round rice and prawn cultivation and the Tamil people, whose Dravidian roots may be some of the oldest known. When Auroville was started in l968 by the Mother, the spiritual partner of Indian Indpendendence fighter and guru poet Sri Aurobindo, it was hardly a welcoming scene: barren burnt dry red soil stretching to the horizon in every direction, with nary a tree to stand under. Well, there was one scraggly banyan looking rather uncertain of itself, under which was living an old woman who provided water to foot travellers from the inland villages on their way to Pondicherry. She’s the one who told the tale of Kaluvelli Siddha, the ancient legend which predicted that in a distant future “people from far away” would come to transform the cursed wasteland into a beautiful green area. a giant forestry project out of necessity when in 1962 he got to this small but growing community on a barren plateau outside of Pondicherry, in the state of Tamil Nadu.

story goes the former Raj almost got eaten by tigers here 200 years ago, and had a run in with a stamped of wild elephants, so he had the people chop down all the forests except for the temple gardens. As a result, the whole place desertified, and there was no forest left when the spiritual settlers arrived. only green now is the 2.5 million trees that this guy Joss and the Auroville residents have coordinated the planting of around the spiritual community in the last 50 years, Auroville.

Went on my first Biomatrix Water biz trip (I've agreed to represent them pro bono for a few irons they have in the fire here in India), I was to sit with the Trustees of a school outside of Chennai (5 million people) and talk about designing an eco park/ wastewater treatment wetland in the canal beside their campus. I like the work.

India is seething, teeming, pulsing, chittering, sputtering, honking, caked with dirt concrete asphalt paint blood mucus flies dung sacred cows and bony blessed bodies with head paint everywhere. Flies lift off when the next bag of trash is added to the mountain in the streets. Grinders and hammers and pistons raise the city like a ferrocement Tetris game. Traffic is an exercise in echolocation, a video game like swerving that overloads the senses, pushing my internal tachometer into the red, no seatbelts, family of 5 on a Honda bike. I always considered the horn an emergency tool, not so here. The horn is the breath of the car, the goose honk that lets the rest of the flock orient, triangulate, and understand its position in formation. The chaos is too much for unconditioned sensibilities, but somehow the madness manages itself. 5 second experiential snapshot of Chennai or Pondi traffic would leave most Mainers in P6 for a month. The near head-on by dump truck or bus is a city wide sport, the final swerve like a Beethoven finale.

but they seem to really understand each other. Being here a week, realize the intitial assessment of chaos was all wrong. The interconnected honk,light flashing and hand-signalling and mirror checking combo is one of the most democratic and palpable experiences of kinaesthetic human telepathy that I'v eever witnessed, moving like a school of fish or flock of starlings, seemingly just knowing what collective swerve will happen next.

Not say its accident free. Men hobbling down the road with gnarled tree branch crutches, legs twisted by soem past auto or moto horror story have crossed the road ahead of my taxi, non-plussed, their rag-tag family in tow behind like sari clad ducklings. The cows lay blithely in the road, next to the median strip, head sticking into the traffic lane, eyes closed in some transcendental ungulate bliss state, copious small dogs are all logey, forlorn creatures, kicked, spurned and rock struck daily as if it were the spiritual mandate of every third 20 year old man or sari clad woman to make these living incarnations pay for crimes in their last life.

The women are the flowers of Tamil Nadu, the canvas upon which the region paints an endless kaleidascope of every tone, hue, value in the spectrum, weaving it into paper cottons, silks and synthetics. amazingly beautiful. Food wrappers, plastic bags and bottles are the leaves of the human tree here (as everywhere). After it has served its purpose it is dropped to the ground, wherever. Trash in not thrown 'away' here. It is just thrown. Yesterday was trash day here, a celebration that teaches local school kids and adults and reminds even the hardcore eco peeps that we must all do our part to change the stupid way we live. Learned about this cool project, you and me in our retirement years http://junkraft.blogspot.com/.

Check out Emilia's slideshow here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7135564@N07/show/

more to come