Auroville

Back to the internet café for me. Wireless is no more at the hotel (This post was supposed to be out a couple days ago sorry!) Somehow I feel that someone wanted me to appreciate my internet time more :P OR someone found out an unknown user was borrowing his/her internet :D Buuut, overall no big deal! 

Anyway, this past weekend the other volunteers and I took a day trip to two cities south of Chennai, Auroville and Pondicherry. The two cities are very unlike the rest of the cities in India. Pondicherry was once owned by the French and has a lot of French culture still present in the city. One can see French influence in the architecture, food, and basic atmosphere of the city. But Auroville in particular was unlike any city I’ve heard of…in the world. No exaggeration.

Brief background: Auroville has only existed for the past 40 years and began because of a dream that this person called, “The Mother,” envisioned. Auroville is essentially a town with the goal of finding peace and unity among humans from every people group and culture. At the inauguration of the city, people from all over the world brought a small piece of soil from almost every country into Auroville. This act sought to represent the goal of providing a place that belonged to no country, but to humanity as a whole. Geographically, Auroville centers around a temple, which to me, resembled a giant gold-plated golf ball. Above is a picture I took of the place...futuristic looking huh? Serious clash between ancient ideals and modern atmosphere.

At first, when I heard about this city, I was pretty impressed by such an endeavor. So, upon arriving into Auroville, the other volunteers and I met up with Keerti, an actual resident of the city (long story short, another volunteer had met Keerti on the plane ride here into Chennai and arranged to met up with her, how convenient!). My first impression of Keerti reminded me of a grandmotherly-yet-hippie-like-palm-reader. Sorry, that might be hard to imagine. But going on, having her with us gave all of the volunteers and I an insider’s look into the thinking and culture of her fellow Aurovillians. I honestly really enjoyed listening to her talk. She spoke a lot about how people in Auroville emphasize reflection, meditation, and spirituality. According to Keerti, her main goal was to achieve a state of inner peace so that no circumstances in life would move her. This was achieved through living simply, abandonment of riches and other selfish ambitions, and constant contemplation of one’s life purpose. Her words were wise, words that you might find in one of those 365-day calendars with inspirational quotes for your every day liking.

Yet, the more she talked and the more she showed us around the city, a strange feeling aroused in my stomach about this place. I found her philosophy (she refused to call her lifestyle a religion) very inspirational, but she seemed to touch upon main concepts already emphasized in major religions such as Buddhism, or Hinduism, or Christianity. Though her words were flowery, I couldn’t quite put a finger to what really drove her to adapt such a way of living. Though Auroville’s main purpose was to achieve a sort of “world peace,” I couldn’t help but feel something unnatural about this place because this city was completely fabricated by human hands. But of course, I could have watched too many movies like Pleasantville where a utopian-like city actually takes away from humanity’s humanness.

As we drove out of the city, a lot of questions came up in my head regarding this city of Auroville. I feel there can be an entire discussion over these questions…here are a few:

-Does the goal of uniting all humans together in one place serve as grounds for the demise of diversity? Is Auroville humanly achievable and if achieved, would that be good?

-Though Auroville is an awesome city, which cultivates enlightened thinking among its people, could Auroville just be a hiding place from the reality of the outside world?

-This longing for inner peace, why is it so widespread in other religions as well?

-As a Christian myself, to hear so many parallels between what Keerti spoke about and Christianity, what are the distinctions between the two?

A new volunteer, Alexei, told me to sit on these questions. I think I might need to sit for a while then.