Courtesy: Nihit
I got off the bus, and looked at my watch. It was half past five in the morning. What an achievement it was, to be awake at that hour! The foremost thought on my mind was to find a way of going back to Bangalore. I walked over to the Ticket Counter at the Pondicherry Bus Stand.
“Bangalore?”
“Come at Eight”, the voice behind the counter replied.
To wait, or not to wait, that was the question. I deliberated for a while and decided to come back later. I walked out of the bus stand. After some haggling, I got into an auto rickshaw. And thus began my experience of Auroville.
Sri Aurobindo (August 15, 1872 – December 5, 1950) was an Indian nationalist, poet, a yogi and a spiritual master. After a short political career, in which he became a leader of the movement for Indian Independence, he gradually turned to spirituality. The evolution of life into “life divine” was the central theme of his vision. He believed that man was a transitional being – “Humanity is not the last rung of the terrestrial creation. Evolution continues and man will be surpassed.” In 1926, Sri Aurobindo retired into seclusion.
Mirra Alfassa (February 21, 1878 - November 17, 1973), known as The Mother, was the spiritual collaborator of Sri Aurobindo. She went to Pondicherry in 1914, and finally settled there in 1920. Before retiring into seclusion, Sri Aurobindo left it to The Mother to plan, build and run the growing Sri Aurobindo Ashram – the community of disciples that had gathered around them. As the ashram grew, she established the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, which served as a platform for experimentation and research in education. An even bigger centre for experimentation would be setup by her in the years to come.
On February 28th, 1968, The Mother read out The Auroville Charter, to the five thousand people who had gathered around an amphitheater on a barren plateau, north of Pondicherry. This was the foundation ceremony of Auroville. As the soil from 124 nations was placed by youth from those countries in a raised marble urn, a challenging experiment was born on Indian soil. Auroville was an experiment in a new way of living, a hot bed for evolution of life into divine life.
“Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity.”
I had never come across the vision of any city. I did not know if cities did not have visions or if I was simply unaware of them. How a city would go about realizing such a vision stirred my imagination. My curiosity made me head for the city with, as I was to soon find out, insufficient planning and, as I was to later find out, insufficient change.
After half an hour of anticipation, we (by we I mean the auto driver and I) reached The Matrimandir, the Temple of The Mother. Centre Guest House, my abode for the weekend, was within a kilometer of The Matrimandir. Half past six in the morning was not exactly the best time to discover that Matrimandir was the centre of Auroville, and that I was clueless about the direction in which to travel that kilometer to reach the guest house.
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Its great that you have finally written this after 9 months of thinking…. Well done… :)
Thank you for the defamation :)
@Nihit and @Shwetha fighting at home not enough? :P
[...] a continuation of City of Dawn… [...]