Chronicles from India

I have a love-hate relationship with India: both delighted by the colour, the madness, the ramshackle vidbrancy and spice.. and horrified by the sanitation, the abject poverty at each corner, the attention of the men.

In India nothing is as expected. The tide is always turning.

Pondicherry. The ocean is wide and flat across the promenade. A statue of Ghandi stoops.. to gather salt? I am reminded of the tsunami that hit here as I watch the few fishing boats and imagine the water drawing back.. to rush forward and swallow everything in its wake. Coming in by bus I passed more than one Tsunami construction project.. they seemed community developments - schools, housing perhaps to replace the palm leaf building in the rural fields. Buildings that reminded me of writing about a walking adventure I had in rural Bodh Gaya, in Bihar then the poorest state in India (ten years ago), where we passed through villages with exquisitely formed "mud huts by monet".

You can not escape the poverty. Emerging from three days shelter at the serene crysalis that is the Krishmurti Centre in Chennai : six acres of carefully tended trees and gardens, white washed buildings and silence. Indeed an oasis. The reality of India was the shock I expected it to be. Beggars descend on me like vultures. Old women show me their sores, disfigured men walk on all fours like monkeys or show me missing fingers or limbs, children sleep on the pavement. My heart reels in horror. Saying goodbaye at Redfern station Andy instructed me not to give money to the beggars, as I recounted my first day in Calcutta, years ago. Even after months of living amongst the modest means of Thailand and Laos, I was so appalled by women and children living in dirt on the street that I let one shrewd beggar woman show me to the bank. I flinch. My head divorces my heart.

Pondicherry is an old french colonial town .. some streets are beautiful, wide, colonial and rich. But it is crazy in town at the moment. Every room in town is full, mostly indian tourists, here for New Year holidays. Though neither virginal, pregnant or with husband, in this overcrowded town, I feel much like I have been allocated the stable room, but I have taken heart from Sri Aurobindo's reimagining of his prison cell as ashram (more on this below).

There are pockets of shade and quiet from the insanity of the street. The Sri Aurobindo Ashram almost made me weep with respite at its cool, daisy filled courtyard. I have a wonderful article at home that talks about consumption - about the feeling that one simply interacts by buying one's way around. It is in many ways hard to avoid .. and the lasso of desire has been firmly around my wallet in the last few days in an exotic frenzy. But I am certainly not here so much to spend as to learn.. and you might indulge me a little as I share.

Both Krishnamurti and Sri Aurobindo were English educated Indians. Krishnamurti's story is quite incredible. He was spotted by one of the head members of the Theosophical Society on a beach in Chennai (Madras) when a child and proclaimed to be "the vehicle into which the Lord Maitreya, the "World Teacher"" would incarnate. He was whisked off to England, educated into Theosophy's esoteric (astral) teachings and had a series of intense mystical experiences. He later publically disbanded the group the Order of the Star which had formed as his disciples, returned all assets to its donors and renounced all formal religious paths and teachings. But he did go on as a worldcentric teacher to talk and teach across the globe (including visiting Sydney a number of times) advocating self directed inquiry and observation of being... and to establish schools and education centres across the globe.

Roughly contemporary, and just a few hours down the road, Sri Aurobindo came from a wealthy Indian family who sent him to England to be educated (Hmm, a pattern) where he was a Cambridge scholar. He returned to India and was jailed for a year for sedition as a prime instigator in India's nationalist movement. While in jail he practiced yoga and studied the Bhagavad Gita.. and had an ecstatic experience in which he saw his cell as ashram, guards as gurus and fellow prisoners as manifestations of Krishna. After release he came to Pondicherry and devoted himself entirely to his spiritual practice.. was joined French woman Mira Alfassa (the Mother) who had also been an esoteric practitioner (more patterns).. and the ashram grew up around them. Aurobindo was a prolific writer (the full volumes of his writing is enormous). He was a poet and he even wrote books about art.. The Mother established Auroville, a big international community close to Pondicherry which was regenerated from deforested land - its been planted with over two million trees and has a wide coterie of renewable energy sources... In town are signs saying look after the birds, plant trees, conserve water. things meet.