Auroville, Pondicherry

I did sleep quite a bit during the overnight bus journey...Reached Pondicherry at around 7 in the morning after about 7 hours of being on the road! After the usual haggling with the autowallas, managed to reach Auroville and settled down in the Centre guest house. Auroville is a nice place, lush green, peaceful, a model 'village' for pursuing spiritual uplift. It's a pretty much international village...people from all over the world, I could hear French, English, German, Korean and what not, some looking for Nirvana, while most others were there just as tourists !!!

Visited the Matrimandir, though only from a distance, it was fully booked for the two days we were there and so had to miss out on the meditation experience inside it. Given the unplanned nature of our trip and the three days' weekend holiday, it didn't surprise us. In the evening, we went to the souvenir shops, bought a t-shirt; browsed and bought some books: Biography of Sri Aurobindo, a book on Sri Aurobindo's views on Hinduism, and another book on his teachings and techniques. The weather was very hot and humid, the sun too harsh, still we did some velo ride in the village...Despite the thermal shocks, cycling on the country roads felt very good...Took lots of pictures. After water, lemon juice, coffee etc. we went back to the guest house. Wanted to rent a bike but it couldn't be arranged as the minimum renting duration had to be 2 days, that meant we had to cancel our visit to the Auro beach :( , and be content with the free bicycle.

At night, after a pretty early dinner(7-7:30) our discussions invariably veered from spiritual to social to the political spectrum...So much so that a person from the nearby room had to knock and ask us to be quiet, since even though it was about 9:45, the usual inhabitants of the guest house were either asleep or trying to be so since they have to wake up at 4 AM!!! We felt guilty that we disturbed them...Anyways after some more discussion in hushed tones we too went to sleep.

Next day it was 15th August, our independence day and incidentally also the birthday of Sri Aurobindo! We missed the flag hoisting ceremony in the morning as we didn't know the venue...We went to the Savitri Bhawan, where in front of Sri Aurobindo's statue some kind of program was going on...Some recordings of the Mother's talks were being played, while everybody listened to in silence. Samosas and sweets were distributed to the people present there (that included us!!) and then we went to see the exhibitions: The first one was on Savitri - the story that is a part of Mahabharat, based on which Sri Aurobindo had composed a 24000 lines long epic poem. The other one was Sri Aurobindo's life in pictures. Pretty interesting. I had mostly known Sri Aurobindo for his revolutionary activities against the British rule, I had only a faint idea about his spiritual side, and hence the visit to Auroville helped me get more exposure to this aspect of his life! The previous night I had started reading his biography too (I am yet to finish reading). Roamed around Auroville a bit more, went to the bookshop again as my friend wanted to buy another copy of the book I had bought! Gulped down some local fruit juice cocktails to fight the heat. 

Called a taxi to reach the Pondicherry town, went to the Aurobindo Ashram, visited the Samadhis of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, bought some more books and walked to the beach overlooking the Bay of Bengal in the Indian ocean. Spent the evening there, watched the independence day fireworks, had our dinner and went to the travel agencies to look for bus tickets, luckily we found the seats, at slightly higher rates that usual. Another overnight bus journey and we were back to Bangalore. Met a couple of more friends that day, at night went to watch the newly released movie "Arakshan" at Inox. My friend dropped me to the pick up point for bus to the airport at 3 am. This is the downside with early morning flights, it ruins a night's sleep! Anyway that sums up my enjoyable visit to Bangalore!! Now I am relaxing at home, looking forward  to the next leg of my India travel : It's going to be the unseen north-east this time :)