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Riding A Bullet, Reflecting on Utopia

by F.G. Pluthero

Yama, God of Death: And what, oh Prince, is the greatest miracle?

Yudhisthira: Each day you swallow multitudes, yet we drive as if we were immortal.

- the Motorbharata

Morning rush hour begins early on the Pondicherry road, with the dawn convergence of long-haul buses from points scattered across the southern tip of the subcontinent. By 8 AM the tree-lined road that runs past the settlement of Aurobrindavan has lost all resemblance to a peaceful country lane and the tarmac is chock-a-block with every motorized vehicle know to man, all barrelling along with the boisterous impatience of blood corpuscles jostling their way through a vessel where the cholesterol plaques are provided by bullock carts, goat herds, bicycles and pedestrians carrying everything from milk cans to credenzas. Coming from a country that is vastly underpopulated according to most Indian schoolchildren, I have always been alternately fascinated and terrified by the hurtling jumble of metal and flesh that magically appears on the highways each morning and then just as mysteriously disappears each night, and in half a dozen visits I had never had a glimmer of interest in joining that insane parade. But this morning was different. Just as the frenzy was hitting its peak I found myself outside the settlement gates astride an Enfield Bullet that made the machine Steve McQueen rode in the Great Escape look new-fangled, gingerly revving the grossly mistimed engine while contemplating the challenge of merging into the madness for the first time. This was a road where a friend had recently survived a collision between the bus he was riding and a truck because he had been smart enough to sit behind the driver, who instinctively swerved so that only the left side was sheared off, along with several unfortunate passengers (actually the man behind the wheel at the time had been hired to sweep out the bus not drive it, hence sweeper and driver both high-tailed it from the scene and are now listed as "absconding"). This was a road that was littered all the way to Pondy with the hulks of crushed, battered and burned-out vehicles, the latter resulting from the rage that the locals are wont to vent on offending vehicles and their drivers, when they can catch them. This was a road....well, there was not much time for further reflection, because the jeep I was meant to be following was already pushing out from the gravel shoulder onto the metalled surface, and without thinking I tucked in behind like a new-hatched gosling following its mother for dear life.

For those unfamiliar with the fine art of surviving in subcontinental traffic an appreciation of the true terror of my situation requires a bit of explanation. Beginning with the technical details, motorcycles are controlled via handlebar control levers, with the normal configuration having the lever on the right activating the front brake while one on the left activates the clutch. The rider's feet get into the action via a pedal on the right side that works the rear brake and a gear shifter on the left side, which one normally taps downwards to engage first gear and flips up to engage neutral and second through whatever gears (there is no reverse, which is why it is pointless to honk your horn and turn around to look angrily at a following motorcyclist when you have nosed your SUV too far ahead at an intersection and want to back up again). I describe these configurations as normal because they can be found on most motorcycles throughout the modern civilized world, but alas not on the Enfield Bullet, a survival from an all-but-forgotten age when protobikes roamed a younger planet where it was possible to survive with a gear shifter and rear brake pedal reversed from the way nature intended, and with the shifter rigged upside-down to ensure that any accidental lurch forward kicks the transmission up a notch. To give them their due, the Anglo-Saxon sadists at Royal Enfield did come up with a useful innovation in the form of a heel-operated lever that engages neutral from any gear - or at least I am told it will do so, as I have yet to encounter an Enfield where that feature is operational. Indeed the main selling point of the Bullet seems to be its ability to move in an approximately forward direction as long as the engine can sputter and the wheels will turn, and true to form the vehicle upon which I chose to make my initial foray into Tamilian traffic had brakes that were feeble even by the lax standards of the original design and a gearbox with more gaps than a hockey-player's grin. This left me in a situation where I was obliged to keep the bike in second gear, feather the clutch to avoid stalls, nurse the throttle (thankfully they at least left that in the right place) and avoid braking - and did I mention the Pondy pedestrians who are wont to wander into traffic without either stopping, looking or listening?

As for Indian traffic, the statistics speak for themselves. I've never actually looked them up, but according to the Guinness people - who I always thought avoided posting records that encouraged people to risk life and limb to exceed them - India has far and away the most crowded and dangerous roads on the planet. This is a place where getting behind the wheel, throwing a leg over the saddle, boarding a bus or simply strolling along the road is an act of faith, and like faith Indian traffic has the redeeming feature of simplicity. Western drivers may be continually distracted by bristling signage, white lines, traffic lights and a thousand laws of the road, but the world's most dangerous traffic system operates - if that word can be reasonably applied - according to a simple triad of desiderata:

Rule 1: Horn, please. This request is painted on the back of every commercial vehicle, and not only is it considered the height of rudeness to fail to continually honk at every pedestrian and vehicle you encounter en route, failure to do so leaves you liable to being run off the road, or worse. At night time the horn honk is replaced by the headlight flick, or dip, which is administered to approaching vehicles, those up ahead and pedestrians. But you really do not want to be on the road after dark, because:

Rule 2: Mass makes right (of way). When you find another vehicle approaching at a high rate of speed in what you naively thought was your lane, it is important to remember that Indian traffic is in essence an endless game of chicken played by overloaded and undermaintained trucks, buses and assorted jitneys which obey no laws save the ones Newton cooked up to describe the behaviour of bodies hurtling through space and banging into each other. These are states with which a sizeable proportion of Indian vehicles are intimately familiar at any given time, which is why so many of their drivers can be found listed in local papers as absconding, and so many of their passengers in the obituaries.

Rule 3: Try to keep left. You might expect driving on the "other side" of the road would be an awkward adjustment for someone used to the opposite situation, but thanks to Rules 1 and 2 this is a piffling detail which is soon forgotten once one gets into traffic and the instinct for self-preservation takes over.

Well, my clarifications seem to be adding up to a whinge, but I trust you have a bit better idea of what it felt like for a defensive-driving schooled motorcyclist who had never ridden a bike that was not in tiptop shape without wearing a full-face helmet, jacket and boots to find himself bouncing along a cratered mess of a road in heavy, noisy, gritty traffic on an ancient machine held together by baling wire and bondo while wearing a Tilley hat, Ray-Bans and long-sleeved kurta. My only source of protection and direction was that blue jeep, which I tailed like I was David Crosby and it was carrying the liver for my next transplant. The reason for the convoy was so that the jeep could be left for servicing in town and we could use the bike to get back to the settlement, which was another trip I was not looking forward to since the only thing worse than riding a grungy ratbike with deliberate care is being a passenger on a grungy ratbike being piloted with reckless abandon. But that moment was too far in the future to contemplate for one confronted by a situation not unlike that encountered by the warrior-prince Arjuna prior to the great battle in the Mahabharata, when his fear and confusion at the sight of two armies poised to hurl themselves into the jaws of death led Krishna to call a time out so they could hunker down to discuss the fickleness of the human mind and the proper course of action amid the tumults of the world. I had no Krishna to halt the scooters and buses in their headlong flight, but in the heat of chaos I found my fickle mind wandering to thoughts of Utopia, which was not that surprizing since I had left one just a few minutes earlier.

The story of that Utopia began with the French, who in the mid-17th century obtained the coastal town of Pudicheri from Sultan Sikandar of Bijapur, whose interest in retaining a Tamilian toehold from clear across the Deccan had waned in light of more immediate concerns, such as the approaching armies of the great Moghul Aurangzeb who was about to swallow Bijapur on his march southward. The French colonists were soon to appreciate the Sultan's situation, because for a century and a half the trading centre they called Pondichery was periodically besieged and occasionally occupied by colonial competitors, until a settlement with the British in the early 19th century finally allowed them to settle in for a modestly profitable run. French suzerainty continued until the mid-20th century when the colony was finally claimed by the newly independent India, which by an interesting coincidence was born on the 75th birthday of Pondy's most famous resident, a former freedom fighter named Aurobindo Ghose who had settled down to become the great guru Sri Aurobindo. Actually, Aurobindo was what the ancient Indian traditions call a rishi, a spiritual guide cum saint who as he himself described it has the complete inner knowledge and the higher surpassing knowledge, therefore he can guide the world humanly as God guides it divinely, because like the Divine he is in the life of the world and yet above it. Such abilities have been claimed by many people over the years, including the Beatles' erstwhile guru the Maharishi, who may be considered to be a spiritual descendent of Aurobindo in the sense that the sage of Pondy was one of the first Indian holy men to attract a sizeable following among foreigners (mostly French, of course). Yet Aurobindo was certainly not your typical export guru; indeed if his parents had gotten their way he would have been pretty much the direct opposite: an Englishman.

At age seven young Master Ghose was packed off from Calcutta to Blighty with instructions to obtain a Western education, and being a dutiful son he set about his studies with earnest, winning scholarships at a succession of prestigious schools including King's College Cambridge. After graduation Ghose continued to follow his parents' wishes by entering training to become the British Raj's equivalent of God's elect on Earth: an officer in the Indian Civil Service, but when the time came to prove he had mastered such vital aspects of civil administration as sipping champagne at the canter without dampening his hunting jacket, young Aurobindo chucked his prospects as one of the heaven-born for an opportunity to become, of all things, an Indian. He returned home as a teacher in the employ of the Gaekwar of Baroda - the potentate who impressed Mark Twain by being entitled to so many shots during a gun salute that the fusillade was often taken for the outbreak of another Mutiny - and as he furthered the education of others for thirteen years Ghose remedied the deficiencies in his own education by immersing himself in the languages, history and culture of India. He also married and began to dabble in the fledgling independence movement, a commitment which intensified when he returned to Calcutta and joined the newly-formed Nationalist Party, which rejected the moderate hopes of the Indian National Congress for a measure of colonial self-rule and set its sights on nothing less than full independence, or Swaraj. Long before Gandhi arrived on the scene the Nationalists urged Indians to support their own swadeshi industries while boycotting British goods - and along with them British laws, courts, schools and other institutions.

Ghose put his energy and eloquence to work as editor of the party newspaper, and it was a testimony to his effectiveness that he was soon arrested on charges of instigation to rebellion. The case was subsequently dropped but Ghose was soon arrested again on more serious counts which kept him in prison for a year until his eventual acquittal, and by the time of his release he had lost most of his zeal for the cause of independence. He had not ceased to believe in the goals or methods of the cause but he had come to accept that its ambitions were premature, and he had also come to believe that he was marked for other pursuits. The authorities, however, were still cooking up charges against him, so Aurobindo decided to go into exile in his own country and headed for Pondichery, which being under French rule was beyond the writ of British law. It was there that the great theme of his life shifted from revolution to evolution, as the spiritual transformation that had begun in prison led Aurobindo towards a unique synthesis of Western and Eastern thought in which he interpreted the evolutionary progressions that had led matter to become life and animal vitality to develop into human awareness as the initial stages in a process that would culminate not with people as we now know them, but with a grand unification of humankind and nature.

According to Aurobindo that evolutionary development will require the assistance of something he called the Supramental Consciousness, a force that will one day spread over the Earth like a divine light and bring perfect harmony and awareness to all creatures. He determined that before this grand unification can happen humankind will have to make contact with the divine consciousness, and his four-decade career as a teacher, writer, poet and contemplative recluse (his wife died tragically before she could join him in Pondy) was aimed at encouraging the divine forces to illuminate our struggle towards the secret summit of existence where man becomes superman. According to his devotees the great rishi is still on the job, although in 1950 he decided to concentrate his efforts on planes of existence other than the mundane one we inhabit, hence he allowed a fatal disease to physically remove him from the sizeable organization that had formed around him at the vast Aurobindo Ashram.

That ashram was headed for almost half a century by Aurobindo's spiritual lieutenant, a Parisienne named Mirra Alfassa - who came to be called Mother by the other devotees - and according to legend it was Mother who finally witnessed the first descent of the Supramental Light to Earth on February 29, 1956. The same legend says that the harmony between Mother's body and the vibrations of the supramental energy were such that she became a conduit for the divine consciousness for the next 16 years, until like Aurobindo she decided it was time to continue her work elsewhere. Before she withdrew from the physical plane, however, Mother dictated her voluminous spiritual memoirs, the Agenda, and oversaw the founding of Auroville, the "city of dawn," which was officially established on February 28, 1968, at a site a few miles outside Pondy, where handfuls of soil from countries around the world were poured into a lotus-shaped urn symbolizing human unity (the urn was subsequently stolen by some crazy visitors, but that's a story for another time).

According to its charter Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole, and the charter goes on to say that each inhabitant is a "willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness" who is dedicated to creating a place of "unending education, constant progress and a youth that never ages" that will serve as a "bridge between the past and the future" and "be the site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of actual Human Unity." Yet for all these airy ideals it did not take long before the utopian community was plagued by some rather mundane discord. Shortly after Mother's death a protracted and acrimonious power-play developed between the Aurovillians and the parent Aurobindo Society, and the eventual result was a split that led to the establishment of Auroville as a tax-exempt foundation overseen by a board of eminent residents and supported by influential friends in India and around the world. The community has enjoyed the blessings of the United Nations, the Dalai Lama and a host of NGO's as it has developed an impressive international organization for spreading the word, organizing projects and raising money to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars a year - all remarkable achievements when one considers that Auroville is a tiny place, even by the standards of a country with seven hundred thousand villages.

There are fewer than two thousand permanent, semi-permanent and seasonal residents distributed among dozens of small settlements with names like Discipline, Solitude and assorted variations on the Auro theme, which are scattered among plots of land that have been purchased over the years in an area where a dozen local villages house inhabitants who outnumber the Aurovillians by over twenty to one. True to its pan-national ideals the population of the utopian community is drawn from a wide range of countries, and not surprisingly the Mother's native land has provided the largest number of foreign residents, followed closely by those great Indophiles the Germans. Auroville was designed as a non-motorized city, but many inhabitants own vehicles like the dubious two-wheeler I was piloting, which may have been death waiting to happen on the highway but it came into its own on Auroville's lengthy network of narrow roads where speed-breakers outnumber signposts by a considerable margin and the crazy-quilt of communities has become so confusing that even the inhabitants sometimes have difficulty telling where they are or which settlement they are in. It is however, always easy to tell when you have entered an Aurovillian precinct, thanks to the trait that makes them all stand out from the surrounding landscape: greenness.

The contrast struck me every morning while I was staying in Aurobrindavan, where I was in the habit of taking sunrise walks with two local leaders of the canine community, Rocky the Doberman and Bluto the Great Dane. We would usually wander past the cricket ground to the tree nursery - at the time one of the largest in south India - and then head out into what looked like a scrub forest, although the shrubs, trees and even the weeds had actually been painstakingly planted over several years. Just beyond the forest was a place that was heaven for dogs but dicey going for any human trying to keep up with them as they raced over raised dikes or bunds, down into gullies guiding streams reduced to dry-season trickles and over the slippery top of a check-dam that provided the only path to the top of the highest hill in the area. From there we could look out over the thorny boundary hedge onto a ruddy, desolate landscape something like the one presented in the pictures sent back by the Mars Pathfinder, except that there was an amazingly noisy gravel mill parked in the middle of it. Standing there, it was hard to believe that according to the grand plan that dusty wasteland is destined to one day become part of a vast greenbelt girdling Auroville, the Divine Consciousness and foreign contributors willing. Like most settlements, Aurobrindavan has photos posted prominently in its main office of the dusty wasteland that existed before the Utopians set to work on it, and while I had come to take the tales of former desolation and deprivation among the natives with a grain of salt, standing on that windswept hilltop it was difficult to remain sceptical and easy to imagine what Auroville must look like from above: a verdant archipelago strewn through a rusty sea.

Imagining the community from above is actually a useful mental exercize in Auroville, because it can be a difficult place to come to grips with and I certainly cannot claim to have done so in my brief visits over the years. Mother's grand experiment may have been originally planned as a galaxy-shaped city of fifty thousand people, but after thirty-odd years what actually exists is a physically disjointed network of enclaves where many of the residents are involved in pursuits that keep them away for significant stretches of time. This is not to say that Auroville lacks a sense of community, but it can be difficult to sense much esprit de corps outside of gathering places like the aptly-named Pour Tous, the communal cafeteria and the Visitor's Centre (which is more oriented towards outreach and sells some of the best sandals, clothes and hammocks in the country). A sizeable quorum of Aurovillians can also often be found in the more raffish confines of places like Palm's Beach Bar, which is located on the old Madras-Pondy road - not the hell-bent for leather highway I was puttering along on the Bullet - just beyond Auroville's tidy stretch of seafront (any Utopia worth its salt should have a decent beach). The bar owes its existence to the fact that intoxicants, hallucinogens and other mind-altering substances are forbidden within the bounds of Auroville - aside from those that happen to enter inside returning residents - because such things are both contrary to Indian law and considered inconsistent with service to the Divine Consciousness. The prohibition is somewhat ironic since the peculiarities of Indian excise laws have ensured that just about every other doorway in Pondy leads into what is quaintly called a Wine Shop - a purveyor of hard and often breathtakingly harsh liquor that has traditionally been smuggled out by the truckload - and even the Muslim restaurants in town will serve you a pitcher of beer artfully concealed in a china pot as "special tea."

The grudging observance of the letter of the law by Auroville's less idealistic residents is one of many undercurrents that run through the community, and through its relationships with its neighbours. The positive aspects of those relationships are easy to see on the surface: Auroville provides health care, technical assistance, education, housing and employment to thousands of local adults and children, and the various settlements also serve as key regional centres for material, equipment and expertise in fields as diverse as computer technology, solar and wind power, ecofriendly construction techniques, watershed management, reforestation, organic agriculture and the medicinal use of plants. These achievements would be the envy of any village improvement scheme, but that is not what Auroville is supposed to be. Indeed if the great experiment proceeds as designed, many of the local people and communities the Aurovillians have gone to such lengths to help are destined to be either displaced, concentrated (traditional villages being ridiculously wasteful by modern community planning standards) or converted into willing servitors of the Divine Consciousness.

This ambivalent relationship with the locals has had some interesting effects upon the Aurovillians, and while I cannot claim to have surveyed anything close to a representative sampling I have encountered opinions that cover a broad spectrum. That spectrum ranges from classical White Man's Burdenism and Gallic cynicism- for instance some of the land acquisition people have taken to deriding the local "speculators" and entrepreneurs for driving a rapid rise in local property prices despite the fact that the same thing is happening all over India - to a willingness to abandon the grand plans in favour of keeping the community much like it is today, or even giving it back to the locals. Between these extremes many well-intentioned Aurovillians have found themselves wrestling with the problem of honouring the rights and traditions of the natives while carrying forward Mother's great experiment, and perhaps it is lucky that progress has been slow enough to allow time for reflection. This has not necessarily translated into flexibility, however, since according to the true believers the grand plan for Auroville is not a blueprint for something new but a map of a place that already exists on another plane of existence, and waits be realized on our own.

That is a spooky idea even by Indian standards, but it is consistent with the observation that many aspects of life in Auroville seem to involve several layers of reality. For every true believer intent on realizing a vision there is a pragmatist trying to solve an immediate problem. For every hustler looking for deep-pocketed partners in the latest avant-garde experiment in community planning (with an abundance of local guinea pigs available) there is someone willing to risk their time and money on a small business running that provides a few new jobs. For every well-heeled idealist who jets in for a few months each year to pedal righteously around the compound on a bicycle there are five full-time residents involved in a day-to-day dash to keep the wolf from the door. For each Aurovillian who believes that, as one luminary recent opined, the community's problems will eventually fade away because a deepening spiritual insight into the fundamental oneness will bring Aurovillians closer to the answers and practical solutions will flow out of that insight, there are plenty of others whose faith is better expressed by the old adage that God helps those who help themselves.

Speaking of God, I never felt so close to the divine presence as I did when we crossed the city limits and the throbbing artery of the highway merged with Pondy's network of roads, alleyways and driveways, each continually disgorging and absorbing vehicles at random. Being a former French colony Pondy is not big on North-American style square intersections, and luckily for my gear-shifting problem the few traffic lights that have been installed are largely ignored while the gestures of the white-gloved traffic cops are taken as suggestions at best (although they have been known to take down license numbers for later chastisement). My main concern was not with the things that could hit me, which were beyond my control, but with the things I could hit, which were many. They included mopeds, pedestrians getting onto, jumping from and running for buses, and cyclists who make their Western counterparts look like mere poseurs by comparison. Like the schoolgirls who swished along in their white blouses and blue skirts in phalanxes four and five across, taking up entire lanes as they chatted amongst themselves with compete indifference to the trucks and buses braking and weaving all around them. They came by the habit honestly, since their teachers could also be seen pedalling sedately along with their black gowns trailing in the wake of passing buses, and as I watched them I realized that these were people who understood the divine consciousness. It is not something to be sought or served, but breathed from the air around us, where it suffuses every particle and protects us from a thousand assaults every second.

Perhaps it was the adrenaline talking, but at the time I would have wagered that my line to the divine consciousness was as good as anyone's, including those followers of Aurobindo who seem to have lost their way after the great rishi's passing. Mind you the evidence is not always easy to read. Mother, for instance was wont to say things like: "When one enjoys oneself and forgets, when one takes things as they come, tries to avoid being serious and looking life in the face, in a word when one seeks to forget, to forget that there is a problem to solve, that there is something to find, that we have a reason for existence and living, that we are not here just to pass our time and go away without having learnt or done anything, then one really wastes one's time, one misses the opportunity that has been given to us, this I cannot say unique, but marvellous opportunity for an existence which is the field of progress, which is the moment in eternity when you can discover the secret of life; for this physical, material existence is a wonderful opportunity, a possibility given to you to find the purpose of life, to make you advance one step towards this deeper truth, to make you discover this secret which puts you into contact with the eternal rapture of the divine life." Of course like all great luminaries Mother was a dictator (in the literary sense) and not a writer, but even cutting her that slack it is difficult to read more than a page of her Agenda without forming the suspicion that she spent her dotage in a stream of senile consciousness that was loosely tethered to reality via some striking reification fallacies. In other words, like many a second-rate follower she took her master's poetic visions literally, and wandered off a weird direction of her own.

Here again I claim no special expertise, but from what I have read of Aurobindo - who scores well below Mother on the obtusometer but hardly ranks as a paragon of clarity himself - he seems to have been operating within the grand tradition of Indian philosophy, where ideas and concepts are used to construct intellectual scaffolds that often have little meaning beyond the goals they make accessible. For instance since his Supramental Light can illuminate from within as easily as from above, there was no need for him to actually see it descend like a glowing beam from the sky or claim to feel its energy course through his veins and nerves out into the world at large. Aurobindo's evolutionary experiments were global in scope and needed no specific focus like a galaxy-shaped city imposed upon the landscape, nor would he have had need of Mother's ultimate self-indulgence: the Matrimandir, or Mother Temple, which sits at the geometric hub of Auroville in the form of a slightly squashed ferroconcrete sphere covered with gold discs and surrounded by a dozen stone-clad petals radiating out in all directions.

As I recall, the Matrimandir is supposed to symbolize a golden bubble of the divine consciousness blebbing forth into the world, and it is also intended to serve as the spiritual focus of the community. Its basic design was established by Mother using a variety of mystical formulae according to which its cosmic energy-focussing abilities put the Great Pyramids to shame, and like the pyramids the main structure was raised by a generation of labourers who sweltered in the tropical sun. Their efforts have now shifted towards the interior, which Mother envisaged as vast, empty space suffused with peach coloured light, sort of like the inside of an oyster shell. That light will enter via the semi-transparent gold discs and a matrix of portholes left in the concrete shell, and it will acquire a peachy tint via an inner skin of glass triangles. They hadn't started the triangles last time I was there, but even in its unfinished state the interior of the Matrimandir is already impressive with its spiral ramps leading upwards and the single shaft of light that pierces its centre, directed down from a sun-tracking mirror located high overhead. The ramps allow pilgrims to ascend to a small marble-lined meditation chamber which has the acoustics and reflective properties of a swimming pool viewed from the bottom on a sunny day, thanks to the enormous crystal sphere sitting at its centre - the largest ever made at half a ton, courtesy of a noted German manufacturer - which refracts the solar beam as it passes through.

I suppose that shaft of solar illumination is meant to be a representation of the Supramental Light, but as I chugged through the hazy maze of Pondy it was not the spiritual symbolism of the Matrimandir that came to mind, but the economic symbolism. That gaudy bubble and its gardens represent a massive drain on the space, funds and labour of a community where most people are barely getting by, where many settlements have hardly been able to achieve self-sufficiency and where efforts of proven effectiveness in organic farming, reforestation and landscape rescue are hamstrung by a lack of resources in a region where an exploding population and the excesses of chaotic development exhaust more land each day (making it more expensive to buy and recover). The Matrimandir does of course have its detractors within the community, but as seems to be the case with most aspects of the overall vision their voices have not carried very far beyond silent protest (some longtime residents still refuse to set foot in the place). And so as it gleams in the sunlight the golden sphere has become both a spiritual centre and the most visible symbol of Aurovillian ambiguities.

I found myself wondering as I zoomed along what old Aurobindo would think about the Matrimandir, or his namesake community, or the bustling city that has engulfed the quiet town he withdrew to almost a century ago, or the vast shambles that stands where his home town once was. Would he see the explosion of Pondy and the festering of his native Calcutta as part of India's destiny, or would he dismiss the modern march of progress as irrelevant to the realization of the divine consciousness? Preoccupied as I was with the immediate demands of survival I felt an upwelling of empathy towards the old rishi, a powerful and original intellect whose writings - when they were not roaring off into the astral planes - presented the human condition with rare clarity and compassion. I could dimly imagine what it must have felt like to live in an era when pure will was a palpable and powerful force in the world, both for good as in Gandhi's crusade for Indian independence and for evil in the battles for domination that wracked the world with decade upon decade of war. In such a world who can blame a compassionate intellectual for wanting to reach beyond social and natural limits to invoke divine forces that can yoke our will and awareness to the cause of human unity and harmony with nature? Why not abandon old rules of thought in a world where they make as much sense as the controls of an Enfield Bullet? What new possibilities open up before a mind that gives up navigating with expectation to embrace the patterns and rhythms of chaos, and exchanges anxious sanity for a calm awareness that is not confused by the chaos our minds assemble around us? I reckon that awareness is something like the state one achieves while belting through Pondy traffic on a Tuesday morning on intuitional autopilot, nursing the faint glimmer of a hope that you might actually survive.

Well, perhaps that was too ambitious. They say that panic is not the best of teachers and I readily accept that I may never understand what Aurobindo was up to, or what his intellectual heirs hope to achieve. Utopias both fictional and real have a grand tradition of posing more questions than they answer, and Auroville is certainly no exception. Perhaps the city of dawn does represent the first glimmer of a future when humankind will reach new heights of unity and harmony, and maybe someday the supramental light will inspire great rishi who will be able to guide the world from within and from above. Personally, I suspect that Aurobindo's more vociferous followers have headed off on a strange tangent in pursuit of something that may have started out as the desperate creation of a yearning soul, but it was meant to be the foundation stone not of a monument but of something much more useful: a stairway to the light that illuminates from within rather than from above. Such ruminations aside, it certainly would be a shame if the egotistical pursuits of a few - ironically in the ostensible cause of ego-negation - ultimately tear the community apart, and Auroville leaves behind nothing but an another impressive set of ruins for busloads of tourists to clamber over. Then again, maybe the gold ball really is a seed pearl of a sort, not for the radiation of the divine energy but for the dissemination of the knowledge that is pouring into the countryside and returning it to verdant splendour in defiance of the ruddy tide that is washing over the rest of India and the world. The great experiment may not put us on the evolutionary path to universal harmony, perfect unity or eternal truth, but in a world that is rocketing like a white-knucked rider towards chaos Aurobindo's children just might show us one of the roads to survival.