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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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More Magic We are in a big traffic jam on the way to Satyam Technology Center this morning. A traffic jam in Hyderabad means an inch or three separating vehicles, animals, and pedestrians, still and moving; swarms of honking, jockeying autorickshaws; interweaving flows of movement across intersections like tight schools of passing fish; and no road rage, from what I can see from the back of my car. At Satyam I plunge into the silence of my office to plan my talk to the partner developer team. It's scheduled for 3... At which time I face, wow, a big crowd, probably 40 programmers and testers. Writers of software manuals, called documentation in the industry, are lowest on the software development totem pole, so I want to make my colleague Murty's job easier by highlighting the value of his documentation. That's where the idea of context comes in. Software development is magic - a visual and conceptual mini-world that appears (on screen) when you stir together the right proportions of programming logic and electrons. But because it's so familiar now, we forget that writing is also magic. A love letter or a written report is encoded consciousness, detached from its original source, but still potent. It can melt a heart or explode into a political scandal years later and half a continent away. This encoding and its consequent extension of consciousness over time and space have become possible only in the last few minutes of our species' history. It's still new stuff that we are experimenting with. We have not yet sounded its depths. Writers and programmers share that history. Writing programs and writing manuals are both acts of magic, manipulations of perception and the embedding of consciousness in non-gray matter! Both professions use language, a programming language like C or a human language like English. Programmers put the consciousness into the silicon; documentation writers help people perform the equal magic of pulling it out of silicon and putting it to their own purposes. Building on this common context and history, we can see documentation as the natural completion of the software development process, not some afterthought tacked on at the end. Context set, we can look at the commercial value of the documentation and the needs of the writers for help from the rest of the development team. Hard to tell what impression this "Navajo" approach to documentation makes on my polite audience. I hope it gave them something to think about. Afterwards, Venkat told me that he had never before thought of his profession, programming, as a extension of consciousness, the study of which goes way back to the roots of Indian history and culture. After work, Dwinder takes me shopping for jewelry. Hyderabad is a major pearl processing center. I'm thinking of a pearl necklace for my daughter, Maraya, and a gold and silver ring for Karen. The pearls at the first shop are disappointing, but I photo three necklaces at the second place to email to Maraya. Communication all the way around the world is nearly instantaneous. More magic.
The White Temple After work today, Murty and I meet his wife Vijaya Lakshmi and daughter Anuradha at the hill temple of Sri Venkateswara. This white temple is an island of serenity in busy Hyderabad. The clean white marble walls and courtyards of the temple grounds turn the stream of visitors into eddies and reflective pools. Symbols of the Hindu avatars are etched in the walls of the temple. Murty tells me their stories as we follow a line of visitors circling toward the inner chamber. There I gaze into the calm brown eyes of a priest for a moment before he places ashes on my forehead as I pass before him. Shortly we spill out into a temple courtyard. I chat with Murty's family as night settles around the shoulders of the city. Vijaya is a teacher with a master's degree in psychology. Anu hangs on her dad, shy about practicing her English on me, until I ask if she takes English in school. "Of course!" It was far more obvious than I knew.
Charminar I meet Murty at the Salar Jung Museum this morning. Like last night at the White Temple, no cameras allowed except the snapshots of memory. School children fidget and chat in a long line with adults at the entrance, waiting for the doors to open. The first dim hall, with its white marble Renaissance statues of Greek gods and heroes takes me back to Europe or America. But side rooms open onto fragments of the amazing variety that is India, Asia, and the world, ancient to modern, war to love, mundane to sublime, flotsam of the evolution of mental consciousness across time and space. Murty is a dedicated and informed guide to Indian culture and local history. We are back in the context again, looking at scraps and symbols that speak of whole centuries and peoples. A famous statue hewn from a log captures another dimension. From the front we gaze at a full size, three dimensional Mephistopheles. Walk around to the back and we see a young, innocent Margaretta equally believable, evil and good on opposite sides of the same being. My favorite piece is a marble statue of Rebecca, covered with a veil. The veil's folds look so true, covering and yet revealing the buxom figure beneath it, that the eye strains to decide if this veil is actually marble or just a cloth trick. After a late lunch we are bumper to bumper, stop and go and stop again, creeping into Hyderabad Old City. This is people territory, cars and busses easily passed by cyclists and pedestrians. This is old India to me, masses of humanity overflowing the streets, colorful sari, bins and wagons piles with fruit and plastic jewelry, honking vehicles, music, laughter, animal dung, cell phones, deer-eyed children, beggars, hawkers, sadhus, burka-covered women. This part of Hyderabad is mainly Muslim, and the crowds are out this evening in a celebratory mood because of the end of Ramadan fasting. We visit the Mecca Masjid mosque, said to be able to hold 10,000 worshippers at once, and are harangued by attendants for contributions to the mosque. Then we join the river of people climbing a steep, narrow passage to the second level of the Charminar in the old city. Click here for a view of the Charminar taken from the plaza in front of the mosque. Click here to see the Old City from high up in Charminar.
Hyderabad Tour A few days ago I made arrangements to spend today with Srinivas Prasad. He is a college buddy of my friend Mahipal, a native of Hyderabad who currently lives in the US. Mahipal asked Srinivas to show me around when I got to Hyderabad. Srinivas calls the hotel to say he will be late this morning to pick me up. I offered to use my Satyam car and driver, but Srinivas has a car. Later I learn that his wife has one too. Both of them commute to work in Hyderabad's high tech industry. I'm still surprised to find an Indian family with a car, much less two. Hyderabad is my first contact with Indians of the growing middle class. Thoughtful and soft spoken, Srinivas tells me about his college days in Chennai with Mahipal. He googled my name when Mahipal told him I was coming. He found an article I wrote about my first visit to the ashram in 1994. He is not a disciple of Sri Aurobindo, but we dip into philosophy on and off throughout the day. We touch on politics, language, and business too on the way to the Sri Aurobindo Bhavan. Mahipal's parents are the caretakers of this small green oasis dedicated to Sri Aurobindo in a residential area. It has a garden, relics, an auditorium for gatherings, and a library. After introductions and a tour of the grounds, Srinivas excuses himself to make a phone call. I wonder how to break the ice with Mr. Reddy, Mahipal's father, whose English is limited - and my Telegu, of course, is nonexistent. I pull out the map of Andhra Pradresh that I got at the hotel. Happily we trace together the 700 km route I took on the Hyderabad Express from Chennai to Hyd. Soma Lakshmi, Mahipal's mother, invites us to stay for lunch, a meal of rice, a dark spicy vegetable that I don't recognize, some kind of bean, and curd. Srinivas coaches me gently during the meal. One is supposed to mix and eat the servings in a certain order for best digestion. "Use your little finger, too," he urges, cocking a critical eye at my other fingers chasing slippery rice around the plate. After goodbyes, thank yous and some somber photos - Indians don't seem to smile at the camera without a lot of coaxing - Srinivas and I leave with Mr. Reddy to tour the city. We visit an Aurobindonian school for poor children, based on the same generous, holistic principles as the Ashram School in Pondicherry. Then we head for the swank part of the city, picking up Preeti, Srinivas' wife, who has decided to join us. We ride through plush residential neighborhoods, with huge single family homes on large lots. What about servants? Everybody has a maid to help with the cleaning, laundry, and meals; but these places would have five or six servants each. This wealthy area borders HiTec City, Hyderabad's Silicon Valley, home of many familiar names - Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, Intel. These big companies are engaged in an orgy of building and expansion into massive new glass and steel business parks.
Dinner at a Punjabi restaurant on the way back to the hotel completes a sweet day with very kind people. Before we leave, I get more stern photos, but manage one breakthrough: a shot with a Preeti smile. |
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 
Back at Mamanram Srikrishan Jewelers, Vijaya and Murty help me haggle over the pearl necklace Maraya chose by email. Then we hang out on the bank of the 
Finally, in late afternoon, we hike into |
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