Pondicherry and Guru Aurobindo

During the weeks we were in Tiru, the four of us went to another city called Pondicherry, 3 hours away from Rebecca and Deo's house. Pondy was a French colony. It is curious, being in India and being able to buy a croissant au chocolat with a cappuchino.. or going to a restaurant that serves French food, or going to a theater at the 'Alliance Francaise'.

Chai in the morning

Do you want to be blessed by an elephant?

Rickshaw for 4 people

How to carry 5000 eggs in a motorbike

Like a lot of places in India, Pondicherry also has an ahsram, Sri Aurobindo's ashram. The guru of this ashram, that also died more than 50 years ago, was very activist person against the english colonisation and he was sent to jail serveral times. He dropped all activities and  started practicing yoga. At some point he got enlightened. From that moment he spent all his time working on applying his good karma creating the ashram to help the rest of the people. At this moment, a French woman that some years before stayed in the ashram for a while, became his spiritual partner. She was known as 'The Mother'. Both through yoga and their philosophy, taught in the ashram. The city started to grow around the ashram,  Sri Aurobindo and the mother founded a University, schools, and had hostels build for the devotees coming from abroad. The buildings and architecture have a strong french influence. It was pleasant to ride around the roads with trees, it did not look like the other very busy cities in south India.

When Sri Aurobindo died, 'The Mother' carried on with the ashram and a few years before she died, she founded Auroville. Auroville is a city created from the New Age idea of love and respect where yoga is the vehicle to be enlightened. The idea of non-discrimination based on nationality or religion was originally very good and for a few years it worked, until like always, men and their ego fucked it all up (sorry for my language Clare!!). Right now the village, that is 10 km far from Pondicherry, is a very organized hippie community where there are a lot of interesting projects, some of them funded by the countries of their citizens or by the indian goverment. There are more than 40 nationalities and more than 1800 citizens which have a special treatment by the indian goverment visa wise.

Auroville meditation center

The other day I bough a book called 'Autobiografy of a Yogi' that tells the life of another guru called Paramahansa Yogananda. In another place I read that this guru with Sri Ramana and Sri Aurobindo were the most known hinduism religious persons in the XXth century. Weird!! Without knowing anything about them before I arrived to India and without intention, I have been in the ashrams of two of them and now I am reading a book about the third one.

Even though we stayed in one of the ashram's hostels, we didn't dedicate all our time to meditation and devotion. We are listening and learning about the spiritual India, but it does not mean that we are going to be converted to hinduism. Actually we spent a lot of time enjoying the little pleasures of life, eating western food, croissants and coffee, driving around on our rented scooters to shop. Cat found the fabric for a dress she will have made by the tailor in Tiru, Deo and Rebecca bought shoes and we spent time buying things we would not find anywhere else in India.