Welcome to French India!

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Where’s The Bloody Zoo?

While I was on the train heading across the Indian continent, Piscine Molitor Patel was telling me a thousand wonderful facts about the Pondicherry Zoo. Stories of exotic animals living happily in their synthetic enclosures while the young Indian boy ran amok around the area trying to collect as many religions as he possibly could were rolling around my mind as Paul and I arrived in the old French colony of Pondicherry. Imagine my disappointment when I found out that there never had been a zoo in Pondicherry!

After many angry outbursts, curses towards heavens (as many denominations as I could think of), and general fits of crying I got over it and finally admitted that “The Life of Pi” was fictional and after that point I was actually able to enjoy Pondicherry. Still, it would have been nice to visit a zoo.

So, now that we can take it for granted that Pondicherry isn’t at all like Yann Martel’s description, what is Pondicherry like? Well, first off let us make the erroneous assumption that I have visited France. In this case I would probably have very little in the way of praise for Pondicherry as I am sure that it is in no meaningful way at all even remotely similar to Paris, or for that matter the rest of France. Not only is the city hot, sultry, poorly laid out and lacking anything even remotely close to the Riviera in terms of beachfront, but the only “French culture” to be found is a profound lack of things to do after dinner. Nevertheless, I would say that in comparison to the rest of India, Pondicherry is the Champs Elysees itself.

However, I have never been even remotely close to France so in my opinion Pondicherry is a wonderful pocket of France tucked away in south-western India. A place where French is more widely spoken than English, breakfast menus list Baguettes instead of Toast, restaurants don’t fill until 9pm, coffee tastes less like boiled charcoal than usual, and where the waiters look at you strangely when you order a spread of four different curry dishes instead of the chef’s specialty .

Both opinions are of course valid as Pondicherry is partly Indian, somewhat French, partially not Indian, and in many ways not French. The city is a strange mixture; one definitely worth looking into.

Pondicherry, as it is now, was first set up as a trading port in 1674 by the French and eventually grew to be the principal settlement of the French colonialists on the subcontinent. From the city, which was built and groomed in the French image (they have rues instead of streets!), the French East India Company tried to grab hold of India only to be comprehensively outdone by the English (and then by the independence movement). This explains why Pondicherry is, to this day, home to a large number of French or French-descended people who continue to speak their mother-tongue, eat dinners at ridiculously late hours, and generally be more interesting and artistic than the ex-pats in other cities.

The French quarter of the city fronts directly onto the Bay of Bengal which looks slightly more forbidding than the sharp, rocky crevasses filled with garbage that mark the stone and sand filled man-made foreshore and “beach”. The foreshore is a wonderful public space which is always filled with locals at sunset and is lined with magnificent colonial hotel-mansions and restaurants. On a number of occasions, Paul and I walked along the beachside road as we searched for dinner and entertainment (only to find that all the restaurants and bars were completely empty even at 8pm). The first four or so streets running parallel to the beach are filled with French villas, old houses and grandiose European churches beyond which lies the canal and further on the Indian quarter. The inner city is quiet, small, calm, and a combination of the two cultures present. We were fortunate enough to be in the city in the week before the Tamil New Year celebrations (Tamil being the name of the local Indian population in the south-west of India) so there were many signs of the upcoming festivities. In front of many buildings, in the middle of streets and in other random places the local people were busy drawing images on the roads and pavements using chalk and dye. Intensely coloured and intricate drawings appeared daily on the streets around our hotel; each one drawn by pouring the chalk between fingers onto a wet surface. Alongside this intriguing cultural practice, Paul and I could also discern the calm and stately French cultural traits which mixed in to make the unique place which is Pondicherry.

Sure, the place had interesting traits, quirks even, but that still didn’t make it exciting. Being the young hooligans that we are, Paul and I searched Pondicherry for the excitement to which it held promise (taxation is supposedly rather loose in the city and it is thus a haven for fun-seekers, however, we discovered that the city is only loose in its taxation policies compared to the surrounding India state of Tamil Nadu. Beers might have been cheaper than in Tamil Nadu, but they certainly weren’t cheap compared to the rest of Asia!) Unfortunately the city fell short in this regard. The food was great in the restaurants that we found but it was notoriously difficult to find food, it wasn’t like the rest of India or China where every third doorway is some kind of low-key restaurant; there was only one “bar” that we could find that stayed open past 10pm (10pm also happens to be the time when most people leave the restaurants) and even it was closed on Fridays; there were some nice cafes though. In the end we had to settle for living the way that the locals do: getting dinner late, having good wine with dinner, and going home to bed afterwards. We did have a couple of exciting autorickshaw rides trying to find local dives though.

As a side note, the best American-style Hamburger in Asia can be found at the “Boston Café” in Ville Noir, Pondicherry.

Le Tour de l'Inde Française

Beach. . . sun, sand and surf. . . hideously poor attempts at a tan. . . damn it’s hot today. . .

These were the thoughts running through my mind when Paul and I decided to head to the beach. Think about it, we were on the east coast of India, on the Bay of Bengal! The perfectionist, wondrous, crystal clear waters of Thailand’s western beaches, Krabi, Phuket, Kho Phi Phi, they all face this very same water! I’ve swum on those beaches before and loved every second of it (apart from those rare seconds where the pesky sea lice attacked in swarms of horror); I wanted to find that perfection again here in India, here in Pondicherry.

Beaches lie in all directions of Pondicherry, except east, west, up and down of course, so the hardest decision was determining which one to go to. We decided to head towards “Paradise” beach as the naming conventions governing strips of sand are never, ever presumptuous or exaggerated.

Hiring a pair of bicycles, the two wheeled, brake-less, rickety old kind that has a seat that could be improved by replacing it with a sharp stick (oh man that seat was painful) we set off towards the beach. We had to ride along the main road heading out of the city, along with buses, trucks, cars, bike, motorbike, autorickshaws, cows, buffalo drawn carriages and tractors but Paul and I continued undaunted for a good half hour. The ride was peaceful and fun as we casually cruised along, serenely examining the scenery and the clear air, we all but forgot about our worries (who am I kidding, we were on holiday and didn’t have any worries to begin with). Unfortunately the beach wasn’t marked in any way, and in fact I suspect that the beach was fronted by impenetrable slums, so we rode right past it and somehow ended up about 10km further down the road than we were supposed to be. That didn’t really matter to us of course, a beach is a beach is a beach, so we just rode down to the water as soon as we felt like it.

Our first two beach-finding experiments failed dismally. The first found us in the middle of a fishing village and the entire beach was covered in boats. The second found us at a sewerage outlet. Unfazed, we continued until we eventually found a strip of sand that was fronted by a small collection of Indian hotels.

I am by no means a rich man, and as such I have never stayed in a luxury beachfront hotel, unless of course you count that $2 a night bungalow beside the Mekong with the Aussie bakery and double-hammock but I know you don’t. So, I really don’t have much experience in the rich-mans beach holiday way of life. Despite that, I had assumed that the main purpose of building a luxury hotel next to a beach was so that the guests could relax on the beach, or maybe even go for a swim. The image in my mind of this type of hotel is only complete when a row of deckchairs and umbrellas line the sands with masseuses rubbing the backs of those guests who have already tired of swimming and tanning. The hotel by which we went swimming north of Pondicherry went against this mould; in fact it was completely weird in every way imaginable. Not only were there no deckchairs, no umbrellas and no masseuses, but there wasn’t even a gate in the fence which separated the hotel from the beach. The hotel looked great from the front: a two storey colonial mansion type arrangement with circular driveway, exotic gardens, and red carpet; but the rear of the hotel was simply a large lawn with a swing for the children. Guests could look out of their rear facing widow and see the glorious yellow sand beach in front of them, they could view the sea frolicking off into the distance, they could walk out of the hotel onto the lawn and sit in a chair while the children played, but they most certainly could not open a gate in the back fence and go for a swim. If the guests yearned for a swim they would have to go out the front of the hotel, around the fence and off the premises just to get down to the water’s edge.

This arrangement seemed weird at first as the two of us Australians though that any strip of sand was worthy of swimming, however, we soon discovered a couple of possible reasons. First off, the sea seemed to be in a perpetual state of storm surge as it frantically tried to erode the beach in time for Christmas; it certainly didn’t look like an idyllic place to be swimming. Actually, Paul and I thought that some areas of the beach were scary enough that we spent five minutes debating which parts were safe for swimming. Once we got in the water we felt differently though as it was actually fairly tame a few meters offshore; it just looked really bad on the surface because the seafloor fell away so sharply. After we had been swimming for a while (and after a crow had tried to sabotage Paul’s bag a couple of times) some locals came down to the beach (locals, not tourists from the hotel, they were all still watching the kids on the swing), presumably they were interested in going for a swim. That assumption turned out to be wrong, not a single one of them got more than ankle deep in the water.

I guess that Indian traditions and cultures are somewhat anti-beachbumming, which is to be expected in such a conservative country, but in light of the horrendous heat that is present even in winter I would have thought that a late afternoon swim would feature highly on a local’s wish list. At least this explains why the beachside resorts don’t need a back gate.

After our swim Paul and I started on the long and slow ride back to town. We discovered that we’d ridden a lot further out of town than we had thought and it took quite a while to get back home especially since we stopped for fish and chips on the way (it probably wasn’t that far, but with dodgy rented Indian bicycles it feels quite horrible to ride ten meters let alone ten kilometers). Fish and chips in India. . . yeah, it didn’t turn out quite like it does back home.

From Aurobindo to Auroville and the Matrimandir

I won’t even attempt to get my history correct here, I’ll just run from my memory, but I’m certain that little of importance will be lost in the effort. I’ll also attempt to keep my sarcasm to a low roar.

Many years ago, in the early 1900’s, an influential political thinking in the Indian independence movement decided that his political work was done and that the time had come for him to invest fully in his own spiritual enlightenment. He sat down and studied hard, learned what he could, and eventually he came to understand a new level of existence reached through the practice of a particular form of esoteric yoga. He continued to practice this yoga, thus progressing his own spiritual path, while he began to teach what he had learned to willing students. He did this in Pondicherry where he established an ashram bearing his name: the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

While he was teaching his pupils and guiding the world as a whole along the path to a new level of existence our dear guru met a French woman who was visiting Pondicherry and together they realised that they were each other’s spiritual equal. After some years the woman returned and began studying and working with Aurobindo in the ashram where she became known as “The Mother”.

Over many years the pair worked together to run the ashram while also meditating for their own benefit until Aurobindo sadly passed on, presumably to some higher plane where extreme flexibility is necessary and the lotus position is a handy trick to know. The Mother continued to run the ashram and carry on Aurobindo’s dream until her time came many years later. The ashram has continued to operate and the vast majority of tourists in Pondicherry visit solely so that they can attend the ashram where they hope to better themselves. This is troublesome for other tourists because it means that 90%!o(MISSING)f the young people you meet are going to be terribly boring while they are in Pondicherry thanks to curfews and bans on many fun things that young people tend to do. Our first hotel actually had a 10pm curfew! We later learned that the entire town essentially had a 10pm curfew, but with a 10 minute drive from the restaurants and bars to the hotel we still needed some extra time.


One of The Mother’s crowning achievements was the creation of Auroville, and this is where my story gets interesting.

There should be somewhere upon earth a place that no nation could claim as its sole property, a place where all human beings of goodwill, sincere in their aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world, obeying one single authority, that of the supreme Truth; a place of peace, concord, harmony, where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his suffering and misery. . .

A Dream, The Mother

The does a good job of summing up Auroville. The township is a galaxy-shaped, internationally populated, self-sufficient, eco-friendly, community oriented, spiritually based, positively valued, peacefully intended, yet to be completed, experimentally operated, hippie commune. It’s a place where everyone works together for the community because otherwise they don’t let you live there. It’s a place where environmentally friendly technologies are thought of, implemented and tested. It’s a place where spiritual people can freely meditate in a non-religious environment. It’s a place where everyone is valued equally. And it’s a place that has the world’s most awkwardly amazing centerpiece.

Although I do not believe in the spiritual aspect of Auroville, that whole thing about a super-race of humans who exist on a higher level of consciousness and The Mother thought she almost attained, I do like the way that Auroville is embracing environmental and social issues. Paul and I went on a short tour of central Auroville and it really is a clean and friendly town which seems to operate harmoniously. Solar power, wind power, water recycling, organic foods and all sorts of environmentally friendly things are operating there and compared to the surrounding environment of greater India Auroville is a fantastic little place. The model couldn’t work in the world at large, but now I know that there is one small town on Earth where everything is still just peachy. Around the centre of the town there are thousands of residents living the Auroville lifestyle: running massage schools, yoga, tai chi, capoeira, or meditation classes, producing handicrafts, and doing a myriad other things that ought to be done more often.

We ate some good organic food, shopped through loads of hand made souvenirs, had a look at some nice exhibits showing off the achievements of Auroville and watched a movie about it’s creating, but then we went and saw the centerpiece.

At the very heart of Auroville, well slightly to the left of that (there is a Banyan tree at the exact center), sits the Matrimandir. This structure was intended to be the spiritual heart of Auroville. A place which signified all the things that Auroville aims to be, a structure which brings the residents together in harmony, a site where people can think, fell, meditate and become a part of the Auroville project.

Or. . . the Matrimandir can be viewed as a massive golden sphere with inverted satellite dishes attached to it which seems to float in a small depression ringed by giant red towers. Inside the structure is a pure white and massive meditation chamber, with white carpet and white walls. Complete silence reigns inside the Matrimandir where residents are allowed to silently meditate (only in non-denominational ways) in perfect peace and tranquility while they face a gigantic (purportedly the largest in the world) spherical crystal which sits in the middle of the chamber quietly diffusing sunlight throughout the entire room. Wow, that’s some intense hippyness, but it’s kind of cool.

Auroville is an interesting place to see and it does give a great example of some of the ways in which our society could be improved, but it also gives a great impression of how a good idea can be taken to some seriously whacked out extremes: extremes that result in 30 meter tall golden spheres encompassing perfect meditation chambers and 70cm diameter glass spheres.

Another Proof For the “Small World” Theory

Pottering around Pondicherry on yet another evening, Paul and I again found ourselves at the “Art Space” which is the only place even remotely resembling a nightspot in the city. We were hoping that there might be some other traveling souls attracted to the comfortable couches, cold drinks, and friendly atmosphere, maybe someone new for us to meet and talk to. True to our wishes, there were a few people milling around as we were so the two of us settled into some chairs, grabbed a pair of coldies, and started to examine our possibilities.

As if on cue, two girls appeared at the top of the stairs and headed for the bar. Paul was beside himself, not in a typically good way though, more of a “why did they have to turn up?" kind of way. Looking over, I caught a glimpse of the two girls from behind and I instantly new who they were. We had once again run into the Scottish girls that we’d met weeks earlier in Goa. Talk about a small world! They were supposedly teaching English in some backwater town in western Tamil Nadu and had been in Goa on a short holiday; now they were on another short holiday and had turned up in Pondicherry.

We didn’t mind running into the girls, in fact it was quite fun to catch up with them, but I think Paul had been intent on saying hello to some other girls that were sitting in another part of the bar.

Onwards To Agra in a Great Hurry

Southern India was turning into an uninspirational place at an alarming rate. Despite having seen dozens of exciting places and a plethora of cultural wonders, Paul and I were tired of being isolated from mainstream tourists. Tourism in India is vastly different from elsewhere in Asia: the country is so big and freely accessible that even with the summer tourist rush the tourists manage to spread themselves evenly and thinly throughout the entire peninsula. There could be a million tourists in India and you could still manage to go days without seeing any of them even if you followed Lonely Planet! In countries like China where your movements are restricted by either government controls or the language barrier (if I hadn’t been able to speak Chinese I would have had a lot more trouble getting into some of the obscure Chinese locations that I did) the tourists tend to bunch together into a small number of places; this is when places start to feel “full” or “touristy”. However, India isn’t at all like this and often, particularly while we were in the south, Paul and I found ourselves despairingly alone.

The solution? Why, head to the largest tourist mecca in the entire country of course: Agra.

To this end, and also because Paul had to catch a flight out of Delhi a few days afterwards, the two of us hightailed it from Pondicherry to Agra as quickly as we could. Three trains, one plane, two autorickshaws, and 30 hours later we arrived at our hotel (Paul put us up in a swanky one because he had gone far too long without a hot shower) in the magical Mughal city of Emperor Shah Jahan.

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Photos

A Giant Golden Shere
For silent meditation purposes only!

Statue of Gandhi
On Pondicherry's beachside esplanade.

Old Church in Pondicherry
This one has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times by the different colonial powers that Paul and I didn't even understand its history while we were there.

Pondicherry Beach
Viewed from the cafe on the beach. Nice coffee, good bakery, terrible view.

Local Ice-cream
Don't be fooled, Uncle John's ice-cream is horrible!

Banyan Tree in Auroville
One of many peaceful retreats in the township.

The Path Leading to the Matrimandir
Walking towards the very center of Auroville.

The Matrimandir
First glimpse of the "heart and soul" of Auroville.

Enjoying the Serenity
They wouldn't let us inside so this is as close as we came to inner peace.

Green Energy
Solar panels powering central Auroville.

Patented Windmill
This windmill was designed and built in Auroville and is used to pull water from wells. It is just one example of the eco-friendly lifestyle enjoyed by Aurovillians.

Tamil Shoot 'Em Up
Movie poster on a public wall.

The Only "Bar"
This is as close as Pondicherry gets to a happening party.

Friendly Student
We met this guy on a train from Delhi to Agra. This was his first day of a new uni course, he was learning Russian. For some reason he commutes to and from Agra every day when he has classes, that means he spends six to eight hours on a train each day!

Hotel Manager
Late at night when we arrived in Agra we had dinner at the only place available. While the three of us were eating this man got incredibly excited to see Punjabi and demanded a photo!

Comments

[Wildacad]

Pondicherry
great bog, I had the same feeling about this place.. however the fruit and vege market was certainly one of a kind!!!