Tuesday, May 11, 2010

2nd touchdown at Auroville!



Quite amazing considering my non-travelling track record. The place is bliss and the fact that I would be allowed to sleep in the car made the offer too tempting to resist.

We stayed at Sharnga guest house. This place and its people have now become so familiar, it feels like home. This time around it was off-season (translated as heat and humidity) and Sharnga was almost empty. The last time around, it was teeming with people and that was when I fell in love with Auroville and Sharnga.



I had a good 4 days at Auroville last time. Like I said in my earlier post, at the time there was a general lack of clarity in my thoughts. (A very handsome man I met, and I mean very handsome, once said that I should look no further than a bacardi if clarity in thoughts was what I was looking for. But in this case, no amount of bacardi helped.) And so I was there at Auroville, looking to spend sometime on my own and think things through. What I did experience in those 4 days was way above expectations.

The place is absolutely breath-taking - acres and acres of man made forests and no sounds except for the birds and the occasional peacocks. People there live as one community, everyone contributes to the community as per their capabilities.

I saw teenagers plucking oranges to make marmalade and taking care of birds and chicks. Their concerns are widely different from our concerns of traffic, noise, latest gadgets and designer clothes and shoes.

Peter Choate, a Canadian professor and social worker, was also staying at our guest house. Random discussions led me to discover that he is a psychologist and I jumped at the opportunity and asked him to help bring clarity to my thoughts. He was immensely sweet and agreed. How he must have hated that moment because I behaved like a color blind person who is being told about the beauty of reds and greens. Despite the block, he persisted and drilled a few things in my self-consumed head.

The most important lesson that I came back with is that there is no use of wasting any emotion on things of the past. What has happened, has happened and nothing can change that. What we should strive for is to do our best given the present circumstances. Maybe we all know this at some level but when something goes wrong we do tend to think about it and there are a lot of 'what-if's and 'why-me's. Peter explained to me the futility of letting the past dwell in your mind - not only is it completely futile, by staying in the past you miss the present.

So now I have been going on and on about the 'present' and the 'now' and very soon I will be left with no friends. Then maybe I can again go back to Auroville and probably never come back.

1 comment:

Ram said...

Right suggestion from the Prof at right time!
Looks like this Auroville has some spiritual foundations, not just another tourist place. Added to my to go list in India :-).