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Published: March 15th 2007
ancient banyan-tree
near the matrimandir in the center of aurovilleTogether with Adi and Melanie I left Hampi on a bus to Bangalore, the "IT-capital" of India. We stayed there for one night. The city is noisy and dirty, but also incredibly "western" - full of fastfood restaurants and huge stores. From McDonalds to Levi's, everything is there...
My 2 friends continued to Kerala and I took a nightbus to Pondicherry at the southern eastcoast. Pondicherry is a small french-colonial town where french bakeries and indian foodstalls peacfully coexist. People go there mainly for 2 reasons - either to visit the famous Sri Aurobindo ashram or nearby Auroville, a big alternative UNESCO approved community-village which was founded at the beginning of the 70'ies. I came here for Auroville, but first I spent 2 days in the internetcafes of Pondicherry and worked on this blog. It has been a lot of work because I wrote the entries for the past 7 months all at once.
As soon as the work was done I was ready to explore Auroville. It was clear for me that I would have to invest some time to be able to learn at least a bit about the structure of the "auroville-society" and all those interesting projects and
the matrimandir
"the soul of auroville" - a big meditation hall in the center of the auroville township communities that are there.
Finally I landed at "sadhana-forest", a vegan farm that runs a reforestation project on Auroville-land. Run by an amazing couple from Israel this project is located a little outside of Auroville and concentrates on tree-planting and reestablishing the ecological balance of a land that had earlier been fully exploited by the french and british colonies. The farm is completly vegan (food without any animal products) and with high emphasize on sustainable living.
Together with a varying number of 40 to 60 volunteers I helped for 2 weeks in the wood, in the kitchen and wherever help was needed. Mostly workingtime was in the morning and then the afternoon was free as well as weekends. I rented a small scooter during this 2 weeks which made me flexible and gave me some time to explore other places too...
It was a great experience for me to live and work in a community for a while and finally the 2 weeks passed very quickly and I have the impression now that this is a place where you could spend months only to explore. Although it seems that Auroville has many of the problems of any other society too,
beautiful garden
in the matrimandir-area it certainly is a very creative place with a lot of potential, motivated people and projects - with a "good spirit" so to say...
Here you find a very short and good introduction to Auroville:
http://www.auroville.org/av_brief.htm
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