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They say I am very old. |
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Fall 2003 trip to Auroville, Hyderabad, and Pondicherry India |
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Contents India calls. India's great poet, politician and seer Sri Aurobindo called India the spiritual heart center of the earth, with its incomparable tradition of saints, visionaries and spiritual paths. India repels. Everything - death, beggars, filth, poverty, air polution, piles of garbage, polluted rivers and seashores - everything is out in the open, parading by, assaulting the senses, the conventions, the morality of the visitor. Where would you look? The inner life of the spirit that has produced some of the world's greatest scriptures, visionaries and art? The grinding poverty of the untouchables, the smog, the pervasive corruption, the crowding? Or both, the bright and the ugly, the spiritual wealth and the material poverty, the warmth and friendliness of the people or the theft and corruption rampant? India is on the move. It's people, more than a billion of them, with living cultures reaching back several millennia, are stretching vigorously into the 21st century. This India log is a record of my third journey to India, this time with a group of 18 people, many from Barbara Marx Hubbard's Gateway process, who answered India's call. My old friend, Prapanna Smith, John Robert Cornell Related Links Foundation for Conscious Evolution 
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Dinner Party This week some executives from DST, my US company, are making their quarterly visit to the offshore team at Satyam. I see several of them at a group lunch with the Satyam managers in the campus guest dining room. I must be going native; I feel more at home with the Satyam folks than my own countrymen. Nothing really new there. My first visit to India, in 1994, was most of all a profound homecoming. After lunch Venkat, the manager for Satyam's DST effort, invites me to the dinner party for the visiting executives at the campus at 7:30. In the afternoon I work with Murty on documentation graphics and then trek back to the hotel a little early to change clothes for the dinner. A stop at the Viceroy Hotel jewelry shop confirms that the gold and silver combination ring band that Karen wanted is not available in Hyderabad. "Not even samples, sorry," the jeweler says, no longer interested. The big swimming pool with wide green lawn, trees, and cement deck makes a pretty setting for a twilight dinner party complete with with music, drinks, and lots of Satyam people. Chuck, my director from DST, arrived in Hyderabad for his first visit just a few hours ago. Chuck is the one who approved my trip to Hyderabad on behalf of the company. It's good to see him. I'm enjoying the evening, meeting interesting people. There's Satish, who loves language. He speaks five of them and hopes he can practice his French with me. My French is only marginally better than my Telegu, but my studies of linguistics give us common ground for an animated discussion. Then there's Saranath, the Satyam account manager, who lives in Santa Barbara. He asks about my time in India before coming to Hyderabad. We speak easily about Sri Aurobindo and his work. Saranath has visited the samadhi in Pondicherry, and he has family members that are devoted to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Again that natural spirituality that is so often missing in my countrymen. The harmony of a rich culture's tones
Tension I'm holed up in my office this morning with a sore throat. It's not serious yet but I'm glad to be away from the others in case I am contagious.
Nonetheless, the documentation meeting after lunch is affable. Chuck worries whether one person, Murty in this case, can have all of the expertise required to manage the whole documentation effort for the software, some 50 manuals. The Satyam managers make reassuring sounds. I think Murty will manage the writing effort with aplomb. I go back to the hotel early intending to get some extra rest. Instead I work late on this web log and packing up my things. I have to catch the train back to Chennai tomorrow evening. By 7:00 I am feeling shaky and ungrounded but press on automatically. Sore throat and dizziness during the night. Lying on the bed I feel like I am swirling around and around. Not quite nauseous.
Fog Karen calls before I get out of bed this morning. I get a 10,000 mile phone hug! This is my last day at Satyam, but I decide not to go in. The fire in my throat reminds me of the illness I had last time I was in India. The hotel has a house doctor, and the front desk kindly allows me to stay beyond my 9 a.m. checkout time. It's fortunate that I don't go to Satyam this morning - I'm in a fog. My driver comes even though I asked the front desk to notify him not to come until this evening. He has a new car number, which I don't think to write down for later. I can't remember the medicine that the doctor orders or how to get it delivered. The wrong medicine finally arrives three hours after I ordered it. Dwinder calls from work to check on me, then Murty. I reassure them that I am alright. I wrestle with the software that generates this log and finish packing. I finally get something to eat at 3 p.m., the first meat of my trip, and then a chicken burger (!) at 6:30 to take to the train station. Murty insists on meeting me at the station. I am woozy and reticent. He helps me find my car and berth. I'm riding the Charminar Express back to Chennai overnight and catching a taxi to Pondicherry tomorrow morning. Somnath put "A2" (air conditioned, second class) on my train reservation form when we changed my ticket to a later run from Hyderabad a few days ago. So I'm going back with slightly reduced prestige. Fortunately my companions in the bunk area are quiet. I manage to sleep some during the night. The medicine and the inner help are doing their work.
Ravi, Rainbow and Royalty I left the US a month ago today. This morning I am rocking along on the Charminar Express back to Chennai from Hyderabad. I have been able to get some sleep despite some discomfort from this sore throat. This is a very subdued group of passengers. I keep to myself. Some curious stares are the only indication I get from my fellow passengers that I am probably the only white-skinned person on the train. Breakfast is idly and wadas with some chutney wrapped in printing paper with those paper feed holes. The toilet is at the end of the coach. Unlike the A1 coach, this one does not have a Western style toilet. I can't find my driver at the station in Chennai. An email from the taxi agency in Pondicherry told me to come to the Platform Ticket Agency near the main entrance of the station, but I mistake it for the information booth. Other drivers are eager for my business. Finally one advises me to go to another place for reserved taxis. There I find Ravikumar holding a placard with my name on it. We are both relieved. Chennai is hot and muggy after the mild climate of Hyderabad. Ravikumar does not have the key for the air conditioning in the car, so he turns on the fan for me. We make an effort to communicate. My Tamil consists of three words that I have probably already forgotten, so he puts his broken English and his considerable talent at finding an intelligible way to explain something to work. We discuss American and Indian national politics, wealth, cultural differences - especially women's clothing - food, religion, agriculture, his village, my hometown. Young Ravikumar, a villager just married and expecting a baby with his wife of seven months, is one of my many Indian teachers in grace, good humor, and tolerance. I am glad to get to Mother's House, the new guest house in Pondicherry built by my friends at the ashram in Lodi, CA. It has beautiful white walls and dark marble floors in a very poor neighborhood of Pondicherry, just a block from the ocean. Prapanna has been watching for me and arranged a third floor room called Courage with a great view of the ocean from its balcony. But also a view into the small thatched huts and houses of the people in this fishing outpost of Pondicherry. It's a stark contrast of wealth and poverty.
After a rest, Prapanna and I visit the samadhi. It's good to be back home. Later we try a new restaurant that Matt told his dad about and look at wedding pictures. While I was in Hyderabad, Matt married his school sweetheart Ahana, daughter of Indian royalty from the state of Orissa. An Indian-American fairy tale with a prince and princess.
Glimpses Oh, what a delicious morning! Don't have to go anywhere. Sky and sea light are streaming in my window. After breakfast, a ten minute bicycle ride from Mother's House to the Ashram's Bureau Central to get a visitor's pass for Ashram activities and gatherings. It will be my ticket to darshan, a visit to Sri Aurobindo's room on my birthday, and who knows what else. The Ashram, like Auroville, is bursting with life and light-infused activities. The light-skinned man behind the Bureau desk interrupts a conversation with another man to order a young woman worker imperiously to finish processing my application. The sight is jarring to an American. Perhaps it is part of a North Indian attitude toward the local, darker-skinned Tamil people that is familiar in Pondicherry. So the human condition also reigns here. It's incongruous, surrounded, as we are in this building, by the words of Sri Aurobindo's majestic vision of a highly evolved future. The mind of earth shall be a home of light, Lynn and I trade stories over lunch. She listens to my Hyderabad tales. She works at the Archives, a publishing arm of the Ashram, during the day; but now her evenings are also full. The Ashram community is preparing a big December music and dance presentation. She practices her part at the Ashram sports ground every evening with some elder sadhaks. The Ashram gets everybody ambulatory involved in this event. The esthetic and cultural dimensions of the presentation are subordinated to the cultivation of health and discipline in the body, This is a transformational yoga, an evolutionary path that wholeheartedly accepts and cultivates the body, indeed, the whole material creation. The physical supports and participates in the evolution of Spirit on earth. This attitude toward the body is one of the distinctive aspects of this path. Occasionally I remember how untraditional this Ashram is, how different from the ash-distributing priest at Tiruvannamalai.
Lauren, a Canadian storyteller, provides an afternoon break. Just after 5:00 she begins the first of two folk tales, one Jewish and one English, to a small but very international audience on the roof of Mother's House. The sun highlights some gray clouds over the ocean, its last work of the day. The hot afternoon melts in a cooling breeze. A ragged black raven rides the currents in the twilight sky with some friends. Then he skids in on the breeze, lands on the half wall behind Lauren, and listens to the last part of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." |
organized the trip. Like his name, Prapanna is a mixture of East and West. He has lived in India and taught at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Pondicherry. He has founded the 
There are big meetings today between the DST executives and members of the Satyam team. A large contract is at stake. The local managers have been working long hours to get their reports in shape. Around noon, Murty comes up to my office to say that he has not heard anything yet: "an uncomfortable wait." We are summoned to lunch, where Paul, Ken, Chuck, and Michelle from the US are already seated with Venkat, Atluri, and other Satyam managers. Dwinder, usually irrepressible, is subdued. After lunch we stroll together around the bird cages on the commons making small talk. The birds seem serenely unaware of the tension in the air. 
Shortly after I settle in, a dark cloud moves toward the shore. The sun and rain gather all the colors of the rainbow and pour them into the ocean right in front of my windows.
I wrestle with this trip log in the afternoon. I am using a new software tool, hard to master because of its amazing flexibility and unusual structure. It's right on the edge of programming, and I am not a programmer. |
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