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This is how God in His love teaches the child soul & the weakling, taking them step by step and withholding the vision of His ultimate & yet unattainable mountaintops. And have we not all some weakness? Are we not all in His sight but as little children? |
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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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Hyderabad Express This morning I find a high speed internet cafe on Canal Street a few blocks from Park where I can email Venkat, my contact at Satyam, about my stay in Hyderabad. Satyam is a huge Indian software outsourcing company. They have a big campus outside of Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh. I'm taking a cab this afternoon to the train station in Chennai. The Hyderabad Express takes me from there to Hyderabad on a 12 hour overnighter.
The coast highway ride, about 100 miles to Chennai, is green and wide, rice paddies and villages. And the road is smooth blacktop. Karen wouldn't believe how highway travel has changed since our bumpy, Russian roulette ride here in the middle of the night 9 years ago. Sometimes the Bay of Bengal swings into view on the right. We pass the turnoff to Mahabalipuram, where the famous Shore Temple from the seventh century sits overlooking the sea. I'm not tempted to stop there this time. I want to get to the train station. I love riding the rails in the US but I've never seen a train station in India before. Do Indian trains run on time? I have no idea. How do you find your train and your reserved compartment? I'll find out. Chennai, formerly Madras, is big and crowded, the capital of Tamil Nadu and the largest city in south India. The cab driver lets me off an hour early at the station. It's huge. You could fit a couple of villages under the station's cavernous roof with room to spare. Seven trains can pull inside at once. Parents, children, large families sit in rows of benches or on blankets on the floor. I see my train number on the electronic board. Slot 5. After a while someone posts a list of passengers on the side of each reserved car. There's my name and berth number. I sit on a luggage lorry and chat with another traveler while attendants clean the car. The Hyderabad Express pulls out at precisely on time, 4:00 p.m. Off into the unknown again. Two men, just back from a business trip to Sri Lanka, share my little compartment. When they find out that I am American, they pepper me with questions and complaints about Bush's foreign policy. Why does he favor Pakistan, a military state, over India, a democracy? And why did he insist on attacking Iraq, which posed no threat to the US? I have some uncomfortable minutes, realizing that I represent the US to these men, even though I do not appreciate the foreign policy of my country. We are exporting democracy to the Middle East, goes the Bush Administration's dream. But are we really a democracy? Are the demos, the people, really in charge in the US, or the spin doctors and the powerful moneyed interests? It is interesting to get the view of the US from the other side of the world. Outside lovely green fields and marshy lagoons slip by with the last daylight hours. We are still riding along the coastal lowlands going north. An attendant delivers dinner wrapped in sheets of printer paper. One of my companions graciously pays for my dinner because I didn't bring any small rupee notes. I think dinner was about 30¢.
Taj Krishna The Hyderabad Express rolls rhythmically through the night. A comforting, repeating click of the wheels on the track and a slight swaying of the coach sooth mind and muscle. Across the compartment aisle, my companions are curled up in bunks. Last night an attendant brought us each a little pillow and a blanket. I didn't bother to raise the upper bunk on my side. I sleep lightly, worried that I won't hear the conductor call out my station. He walks through the coaches sounding out each stop loud enough, but I have a hard time understanding what he says. Once the train slows to a stop and floats in a pool of black ink for a while. No town lights in sight. Next time I wake up we're rolling again. My companions are up early and to the bathroom at the front of the coach. This is first class AC (air conditioned), and the restrooms are not as bad as I imagined. I don't discover the western style toilet till I'm getting off the train. At 6:20 a.m. all three of us disembark at Secunderabad, sister city of Hyderabad. Venkat told me that the driver would meet me on the platform where my coach stopped. I'm going to have a car and driver to myself all the time I'm in Hyderabad, courtesy of Satyam. I look around for a sign with my name. No sign or driver in sight. I haul my luggage up and down the platform a short distance to scout for him and for some orientation to this, another big station. I'll wait and people-watch. A vendor with a fog horn voice strides by with a battered metal jug, "Koffeeee, koffeeeee!" The sound powers horizontally along the platform, brushes aside the hissing of air brakes and plows through the happy greetings of returning travelers. He has a stack of little paper cups and with just two hands deftly maneuvers the hot black stuff, the jug, a cup, milk, sugar, and change for a customer. A man walking on the track below the platform catches my eye. He is wearing a dark slicker and pants. He's shoveling brown sludge from the ties between the tracks into a bucket. It takes me a few seconds to connect the dots. I wonder if he is a Dalit. Two tracks away a train loads passengers into dingy fourth class coaches. A constant stream of travelers climbs the coach steps and slides into the solid mass of people bulging through the windows. It's 7:00 and still no cabbie. Time to call. How to make a public phone call from an Indian train platform? I find a little glass booth with two attendants to manage the single dial phone and the money. Let's see, do you dial a prefix? Uh oh, I get Venkat out of bed. He tells me to stay where I am and they will find me. But after another half hour wait, I go looking for the station lobby. Up a flight of stairs to a covered overpass. Throngs of people moving purposefully every which way. I've crossed all the tracks and dragged my stuff down to ground level again when I think I hear my name on the public address system. Yup, there it is again. Now to find the main entrance. As I emerge from the station, a handsome man with a calm and welcoming smile walks toward me. It's Venkat, manager of the Satyam team that is partnering with my US company. And a few moments later, Dwinder, turbaned with a dark beard and twinkling eyes. He's also a manager on the Satyam partner team. Dwinder finds my car and driver, grabs my luggage and rides with me to the hotel. I'll find this level of gracious hospitality the whole time I'm in Hyderabad. I'm out of place at the six story Taj Krishna luxury hotel in downtown Hyderabad! Tall Punjabi attendants in stable finery open the cab door for arriving guests and take our luggage into the lobby. Marble fountains and floors, thick rugs, tropical hardwood panels, king size beds, hot showers, in-room high speed wireless internet connection, 40 cable channels from ESPN to Telegu (language of Andhra Pradesh) soap opera. I'm not in Kansas any more. Nor in Auroville. For $115 (US) a night, guests get such deferential sir-ing that we must have landed as royalty or the wealthy aristocracy in some earlier India. It doesn't dawn on me immediately that we, the guests at this five star hotel, are the moneyed class of the world. And many of us represent the most powerful institution in today's world, the corporation. This is a sobering thought. The corporation is the organizing force of the modern world - luxury, convenience, power, wealth. It's organizing goal is profit. The US and many other countries grant it the right of legal personhood, to which it applies the full force of its money and power. But it has no soul. It is a titan, running the world, rushing the world toward some unintended destination. We are living in its fairytale. Dwinder leaves me in the luxury lap of the titan. At the hotel desk the attendant says that I am lucky to get a room. The Afro-Asian Games, a two-continent olympics, have just finished here. Those muscular, energetic types wandering the lobby this morning are soccer and track athletes. I get some breakfast from the international cuisine at the hotel cafe and settle into my room, 437, with a view of smoggy Hyderabad. I'm going to enjoy this zipped up luxury for the whole day.
Satyam First Day My driver just arrived for the hour commute from the hotel to the Satyam technology campus. We wade into Indian style rush hour traffic: Crossing tidal waves of motorized, human-powered and animal-powered vehicles flood through intersections and lap into every crack and opening. Inches separate truck and scooter. Motorcycles fish-like slide through momentary gaps. With a hurrying fluidity that is almost beautiful, a surging languor, we, the flooding travelers, are not so much individuals going somewhere, but bits of flotsam riding the peaks and troughs and arms of a great rolling, waking, stretching city-being. Thanks to my Satyam driver, I don't have to navigate; I get to watch. A big, brawling energetic city bursts out new construction on every side, jams roads with cars, cycles, scooters, trucks, thousands of autorickshaws belching dark blue smoke, and a seasoning of the occasional bullock cart. No freeways yet, but four-lane divided highways are carving up the outskirts of the city with a peculiar combination of heavy machinery and skinny, shovel-wielding men and women. We pop free of the city and skim along green fields and clumps of buildings, then slow for two speed bumps in the middle of a village of old India. We snap ahead 200 years again and swing into the big beautiful Satyam campus. Out in the country north of Hyderabad, it winds acres of grassland, lawn, and forest around a state-of-the-art software development center, employee housing, and guest facilities. My first glimpse of the technology center building flashes me back to the Research Center in California. But the dark liquid eyes, the colorful dress of the women employees, and the melodic Indian English remind me of the same underlying sweetness that I've found elsewhere in India and among Indians in the US. Satyam has taken over development of a software suite for the company where I work in the US. My job here is to familiarize them with the writing methods and styles used to document that software. A new writer at my company spends more time learning than producing his first year and a half. Writing manuals for complex business software takes time and experience and a love of words. I've been doing it for 12 years. Murty, a crusty, articulate former editor of an English language newspaper, is my Indian counterpart. The way he caresses consonants and lingers over vowels as he speaks marks him as a lover of words. He'll be good at this job.
Golconda Fort After my morning immersion in Hyderabad traffic, I introduce Murty to WWP, software that creates online help for Windows programs. He has created online help before but not with WWP. He likes to figure things out himself, so I leave him to it most of the day. Venkat has asked me to speak to the Satyam team about documentation, so I begin gathering ideas for the talk. After work Somnath, another member of the Satyam team, takes me to Golconda Fort on the outskirts of Hyderabad. This 500 year old ruin, with six foot thick stone walls and pillars, still trails a remnant of the glory of the Qutub Shahi kings. It was a marvel of architectural engineering and acoustics for its day. Click here for more pictures of the fort. After dark a light show playing on the walls and towers of the ruins, dramatizes the story of the history of the fort and its people. Som takes me to his favorite vegetarian restaurant on the way back to the hotel. I'm finding an easy comfortableness with many of these Indian men. I think the permeation of spirituality in Indian culture gives them a foundation for open-mindedness and lack of cynicism. Their lives seem to float on a background awareness of the divine, like ships always at home on an eternal mother ocean.
A Wider Context
I got an idea for my documentation talk from the trip to Golconda yesterday. The Satyam folks are proud of their company and their city. They want to give me, a foreigner, some context for understanding who they are and where they come from. So they take me back in time - to Golconda Fort and its royal history and to the Salar Jung Museum and the old city, where Murty has offered to take me on Saturday. From a cultural point of view, all that is context. This reminds me of the Navajo practice of answering important questions by starting at the beginning - all the way back at their creation story. So replying to an important yes or no question can take three hours! As hasty as we are today, that might seem ridiculous, but starting at the beginning puts everything into context, and therefore into harmony, especially if you have a coherent world view and cosmology. The unprecedented mixing of peoples during the last 500 years has shattered the old insular cosmologies of the past. So much so that we no longer have a common context, even with many of our neighbors, not to mention people from other nations or ethnic groups. The old skins are broken and the new wine is not here - yet. A new context is emerging around us, but it's not here in plain view - yet. More later about this notion of context and how it relates to software documentation. Now I'm back at my hotel and I need to finish work on the details of the talk. It's due tomorrow. |
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 
The cab is waiting for me when I drag my luggage down to the Park gate before noon. I'm going to miss Richard's birthday party today and Matt's wedding on Tuesday. I'll be back in Pondicherry in 10 days.
Dwinder and Murty join me for the daily multi-course formal lunch at the Satyam guest club diner. Then we stroll around the grounds where they have exotic birds and rare spotted deer for the visitor's pleasure. Plaques beside several young saplings commemorate some of their high powered visitors: Bill Gates; Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, |
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