How I Became a Right-Wing Nut Job

            I have now spent an entire week in Auroville, and still don’t understand the place.  I have, however, been getting increasingly strong vibes that I might be a conservative crackpot.  A la Rush Limbaugh.  And the funny thing is that my political views haven’t changed at all.

            Dami and I are here to look into all the sustainability research and development that is going on here.  The community places a very heavy focus on sustainability, and so there are many people working on reforestation, green construction, solar energy, and making the toilette water smell ever so much less like shit so that it can be sprayed absolutely everywhere under the auspices of irrigation and cleaning but with what I suspect to be the true purpose of making the entire place smell vaguely of a curry-infused horse stable so that everyone is constantly reminded of how granola they are being.  But then again I’m a cynic.

            But there is actually some really cool stuff going on here.  The communal kitchen serves 1,000 people lunch a day, and cooks it all entirely using a huge parabolic mirror to heat a steam coil.  The elderly mad who gave us the tour of the facilities rappelled into the dish, carefully avoiding the focal point so he didn’t get steamed like the green beans cooking somewhere below.  It reminded me of a geriatric James Bond movie.

            The architecture and design that is being employed is fascinating as well, focusing on trying to deal with the hot, humid climate while also providing ambient light.  Lots of developments about building materials that insulate well, ways to make windows that won’t roast while they light, diffusing light through the roof, etc.

            This leads me to the problem that I have with so much of Auroville.  We are here, ostensibly, with the long-term goal of potentially applying some of the developments in Auroville to rural villages, to promote green development.  But everyone here focuses on sustainability as a lifestyle, an integrated system of life choices and behaviors augmented with technology.  And when you phrase it like that, it sounds completely reasonable.  Here is the problem.  Auroville views itself as an example to the world, and essentially thinks that everyone should live in little cooperative communes.  At least three or four times we have heard long diatribes about how the economic crisis proves the inherent flaws of capitalism and that the only logical solution is that the entire system should be abandoned in favor of an egalitarian, cooperative community based on the mutual exchange of services and all that.  It takes just about all of my self control to resist saying something along the line of “You’re so right!  There are so many examples of capitalism failing, and communism has just a perfect track record.  Quick, call the Russians and the Chinese, tell them that I need to speak to Putin and Hu Jintao immediately, and that I have an innovative, never-tried-before model that shows real promise on paper…” 

There is all this self-righteousness about how sustainable their model, but then you ask about funding and it goes something like this.  “Oh, we get grants.  And donations.  And sell shit to tourists who come to gape in amazement at our ridiculousness.”  And I’m sure that all the money that is given to them comes from completely sustainable enterprises.  And then they start talking about scalability, not seeming to realize that if, by some mass hallucination or an act of a cruelly humorous god the rest of the world converted to this system, they wouldn’t be special anymore and all of their revenue would be cut off.  Minor details.

Some background.  Aurovillians are trying to model a society after the spiritual ramblings of an aged ‘Mother’ who gained this spiritual authority by being the ‘spiritual companion’ of Sri Aurobindo, a yogi who was a part of the Indian independence movement.  Maybe I just have a dirty mind, but the phrase ‘spiritual companion’ sounds a little suspicious, but anyways moving on.  They aren’t trying only to apply her teachings to spiritual life—that wouldn’t be any weirder than any other religion I guess, or at least only marginally weirder.  They try and apply it to things like city planning.  And architecture.  The zoning of the place is literally based off of a doodle she did on a napkin.  I couldn’t make this shit up.  Well maybe I could, but it would probably involve some form of rehab afterwards, and narcotics charges if I was really unlucky. 

There are some things that I can say for the regular Aurovillians.  For instance, they believe in the utility of the internet, and plastic.  And newfangled modern building materials, like metal and cement.  I mention this only because there is a subset of Auroville which has in fact shunned the nefarious effects of these newfangled capitalist plots, as I found out on Friday.  They do, from my observation, believe in cloth, although it seems as if that one might have been a close vote.  Or perhaps, if we had listened very carefully while approaching their remote jungle community, we would have heard faint cries of something along the lines of “quick, hide the fig leaves, the tourists are coming!”  But I am merely speculating.  Every week they lead a tour of their vegetarian-vegan-organic-tribal-simplistic-communal-sustainable-donation-based-economy society, which I went on.  I heard the phrase “the Community,” pronounced with the capital letter, 7 times (yes, I counted.  Are you really surprised?) in a fifteen minute period.  That tells you about all that you need to know.

But anyways Zack, tell us how you really feel.

I complain, but there certainly are some redeeming factors of this place.  Easily number one on this list is my means of transportation—5-speed motorcycle.  Auroville is spread out across miles of red-dust roads through nondescript lush green jungle, and it is essential to have some form of motorized transport to get around.  So I am renting a motorcycle.  It is important to note that I have never driven a manual vehicle before, which made the first day highly memorable.

Suresh, the bike guy, was getting me set up with transportation on the first day, and he had got the numbers of people wrong and so was one bike short.  So we went to his house, where he keeps the bikes when they aren’t being rented.  So I learned how to start, and how to shift gears, on a small dirt road in a tiny Indian village, dodging chickens as they crossed the road.  Why they did so is a question for the ages.  I should be shot for that joke.  Suresh and a couple other random Indian men laughed at me as I stalled it the first 124 times before figuring out how to actually get it moving, yelling out (essentially useless) advice in English broken by substandard education and laughter.

After that initial difficulty, getting around on the motorcycle has been excellent.  Going around Auroville in some places is quite similar to off-roading, ie rocky roads, huge bumps, sharp turns, mud puddles.  It takes me 15 minutes (conservatively, if I get stuck behind an obnoxious truck) to get to the beach.  One day I was bored, and I just drove down ECR—that’s East Coast Road, the Indian equivalent of HW 1 for those of you not ‘down with the lingo’—for about twenty kilometers, passing through villages and getting frequent views of the ocean.  A couple frightening moments, the most memorable one was when I realized that my safest option was to pass a large truck that was going about 80 kph by swerving into oncoming traffic.  The dangerous option was staying behind said truck and hoping that the coconuts precariously piled into its bed didn’t fall and brain me.

Another aspect of this place that has the potential to distract me from my relative-insanity is the beach.  I’ve now been there a couple time, but always in the wrong location.  Yesterday I found the surf spot.  And the number of a guy who rents boards. This looks promising.  The water is about 78, clean (yes, in India.  No, I haven’t completely forgotten what clean means.) with nice, rolling, medium sized waves. 

Summary.  ‘Normal’ is defined by the average person, and the average person here is a hippy communist who doesn’t believe in currency or private property.  And they are French.  And they don’t get the irony of a sustainable economy based on donations and tourism income from people who have almost invariably flown inordinate distances to get here.  Hence placing me far, far to the right of normal.  It will be nice to get back in the states again, and be frustrated because we cant agree on the small things and the petty differences.  I never thought that would be something that I missed.  But on the bright side, after I post this and eat lunch, I plan to ride my motorcycle down to the beach and go surfing.

On Renouncing the Capitalist Oppressors and Becoming One with the Frustrations of Formatting

            I now know why people like to be self employed.   But I get ahead of myself.

            Something from the end of our Thanjavur visit which I didn’t give the attention it deserves.  Elephant.  We saw it at the big temple in Thanjavur, where it was there to give blessings to/extort donations from tourists and pilgrims alike.  For 50Rs (marginally more than a dollar) you could ride it.  So of course, being the good little American tourists that we are, we did.

            I have seen a number of elephant-riding operations at zoos etc, and this one was a little different.  At the zoo version, you go from a raised platform that gets you up to elephant-height, then step over to some form of saddle on the elephant’s back.  I think that what I did was more akin to rock climbing.  Albeit with a rock covered in pliant and tough flesh.  It was unbelievable, scaling its shoulders and using its raised leg as a foothold.  And I sat on top, separated from the elephant by nothing more than the thin fabric of my pants.  I could feel the bones move beneath leathery skin as the huge gentle animal shifted beneath me.  Its hairs were course beneath my fingers. 

            We returned to Chennai, and that weekend we decided to go to Bangalore.   This was not a good idea in terms of sleep.  We took the train back on Wednesday night, getting somewhere in the realm of 4 hours of broken sleep before having to get off the train at 5 in the morning, take a taxi to our hotel, then go to work.  Tried to recover Thursday night, then boarded a bus Friday night.  Im not very good at sleeping on busses.  Not very good at all.  I think I got around 3 hours of sleep.  We toured around Bangalore—not all that much to see, a palace and another Indian city—then went out.   Bangalore has a much better bar scene than Chennai, and their officials have generously extended operating hours to 11:30, a big jump from the 11:00 last call that we have grown accustomed to.  Pretty crazy, I know.  Slept that night, more touristy stuff in the morning, then back to the bus station and another night of maybe 3 hours sleep, optimistically.  So in review, of 5 consecutive nights 3 of them were spent on a moving vehicle. 

            Getting on that last bus to Chennai was interesting.  We had split up, and me and Robert, without a functional phone between us, were trying to find our way to the bus.  We got to the station fine, only to realize how absolutely huge it was.  And all the signs were in Hindi.  And not very many people spoke English.  And those who did speak English tended to be just about as confused as we were.  We got ourselves pointed in what we hoped was the right direction, then started wading off, using a building as our target.  It was like a maze of honking, shifting walls.  We had to pass through a huge parking lot of busses, all of which were trying to maneuver around the others, get to their platforms, just sit there.  A ball of string would have been no help in finding your way out of this labyrinth—it would have been soon snapped by the weight of a passing bus.  By a pure stroke of luck the girls saw us and yelled, and we found our bus together.

            The last week has been boring.  We have been finishing up our final report, which has taken us somewhere in the realm of 6 days to do even though if any one of us had just gone and done it it probably would have taken somewhere in the realm of 3.  Some inordinate amount of time has been spent making all of the formatting work together, and this has made me wonder something about work in general.  How much time, at an average office, is spent actually producing something, as compared to the time spent talking about what people should be producing, fixing it when they misunderstood their project, and trying to fucking understand the ineffable mysteries of Microsoft Word auto-format.  

We also gave our final presentation, and discovered that Indian office culture is not very familiar with the idea of constructive feedback.  Once we finally did corner a number of people, we got very solidly confirmed what we have been suspecting all along—that our project was very confusing.  Most of the people we talked to were disappointed in what we had done, but none of them for the same reasons.  ‘You needed more quantitative data.’ We were told it was a qualitative study. ‘Really?  Oh.’  ‘It made too many recommendations , that’s for the design team to do,’ and then ‘we wanted you to spend more time thinking about your recommendations.’  Etc.  Apparently not only were we unsure about the point of our project, but they were too.  On the bright side the person we thought was our ‘point person’ at the IFMR was happy with it.  Questions still remain as to whether he was actually the point person.

            I think that the conclusion that we reached, and what I believe, is that we did the best we could with what we had.  If they thought that we were going in the wrong direction, there were plenty of intermediate products which showed what direction we were moving towards, and they never gave us feedback during the process.  And if they wanted us to be more quantitative, we needed more resources.  We simply did not have the translators, the data, or the skill-set to accurately assess risk profiles etc on education loans. 

            So a little bit of bitterness there. 

            Moving on to my next project.  There are three more weeks left of my internship.  I will be spending them living in a cult. 

            OK,  not quite a cult.  They only have to give up all their worldly possessions to join, follow the teachings of the Mother who has “left her earthly shell,” and use words like ‘universal,’ ‘tranquility,’ ‘harmony,’ and ‘spiritual’ a lot.  So judge for yourself.  They are doing a lot of very interesting green technology stuff, and we are looking to see if we can find ways to take that technology/their ideas and apply it in different situations.  Like ones where people don’t shave their head and spend much of their time meditating.  Some of the ideas are fascinating—the kitchen is completely solar, they clean dishes by letting fish eat the food off and then baking off the bacteria in the sun, and they are trying to improve mud construction technology.

            Im really looking forward to it.  Partly because of all the interesting technology stuff, partly because I think that the people living there are going to be really interesting, partly because I think it will be much easier to exercise (running in Chennai is difficult.  Especially if you are working during the day, and don’t want to wake up in the early morning) and then partly for another reason.

            We think that we are going to be renting scooters.  This is very exciting,  I have been wanting to ride a scooter or motorcycle since I got here, partly because relying on rickshaws for transport is frustrating (I really don’t want to bargain right now, just take me to work PLEASE) and partly because I’m a thrill-seeking teenage boy. 

            Im not exactly sure what the internet situation is going to be, so if you don’t hear from me for a while that’s probably why.  Or I’ve shaved my head, started wearing orange robes, started meditating on the meaning of life and the teachings of the mother, and started drinking copious amounts of Kool-Aid.  Either way.

On the Dangers of Mobs of Indian Alcoholics

Thanjavur, where we were doing field research, is called something to the effect of “Temple Town, Tamil Nadu,” AKA the only big thing that is there is this huge Hindu temple built in the 1200’s.  The thing is massive, and you can see the top of it all the time when you arrive on the train, and while going on wild rickshaw rides through poorly laid out streets to this school, or that bank.  It is the only reason that any tourists come to Thanjavur, and tourists do come to Thanjavur.  We had been in the city for about 10 days and still had not gone.  We had two more days.

            The decision was made that we would save some money (what worked out to be maybe $2.50 between the 7 of us who were going, but which sounds much more substantial when it is phrased as 150 rupees) by taking the bus.  So we got on one that would take us near the temple, and rode around.  For about an hour.  This was a big bus, one of the articulated ones that remind me of a caterpillar, and we were going down tiny streets.  I think I could have touched buildings or stolen from the displays of shops through the window.  Eventually we reached a bend in the street that the bus just stopped, some Tamil way yelled from the front, and everyone started unloading.  In the middle of some random residential area.  I came to the conclusion that this was not the bus’ normal route.  We walked the rest of the way to the bus stand. 

            We realized why we had been sent on such a twisted path—detours to avoid the motorcade route.   The chief minister—equivalent to a Governor—was in town.  Equivalent in many ways, actually, for the Californians at least.  The current Minister was a retired actor. 

            There were men everywhere at the bus station, in their best white shirts and either pants or the skirt-like cloth wrapped around the waste and kilted up between the legs.  The were everywhere.  Filling the streets, streams of men in both directions, near impossible to navigate or oppose.  We tried to wade through, but Shulpa was getting nervous.

            “They are here to see the Chief Minister.  And after he speaks, they will start drinking.”  An aside that will make this make more sense: we have noticed that to most of the relatively high class and socially sheltered IFMR employees, anyone who drinks at all is an alcoholic.  It is pretty entertaining at the office, because a good number of the employees are either from the west or schooled there, and they talk about partying in a veiled way, making sure they know who is listening.  Microcosm of the clash of cultures that is going on here.  Apparently as recently as three years ago self appointed moral police would go into the legal hotel bars (closed at 11!) and cause a ruckus if men and women were dancing to closely.  One of the top bars was apparently shut down because a married couple was found kissing.

            Aside aside, Shulpa was worried about all the drunks, and wanted to go back.  It was getting dark anyways, so there would not be much to see at the temple, so the girls decided to go back with her.  Robert and I decided to stay.  The prospect of unruly crowds, a drunken political Indian populace, and some foreign street theatre was too good to pass up.

            We were at an arbitrary street corner.  There were wooden structures up, displaying huge posters easily 40 feet into the air.  And this isn’t the kind of wood you can buy at Home Depot—we’re talking glorified sticks with the bark stripped off lashed together with cheap rope.  Those men brave, or drunk, enough and looking for a better view climbed up the open structures and peered out at the commotion below from behind the oversized face of their state leader.  These structures lined the street for quite a ways, and we were at just an arbitrary stretch of it, but by my count I could see around 6000 people from our vantage point sitting up atop a wall that separated the street from a school’s grounds behind.

            Groups in young men in special uniforms strutted through the crowd, proud roosters in the party’s red back and yellow, waving flags bearing a rising sun graphic in the air.  Soldiers kept order, and there were a lot of them.  All over the place.  Constantly moving, as vans unloaded a group here, then picked up some of the others, moved them to some other locations, then another group came running from a different end of the street, and they were all the while trying to clear a path for the motorcade that was soon coming.  Holding back enthusiastic mobs behind a rope, occasionally spotting a troublemaker and berating him with unfulfilled threats of violence.  It felt vaguely fascist.  This impression was probably not aided by the fact that some of the banners had swastikas on them.

            Both Robert and I had full liters of water.  The men sitting next to us asked for a drink, and our bottles were soon passed around without any further consent from us, returned when finally empty.  Not exactly what I had been expected.

            People kept on noticing the whiteys in the midst of all this Indian chaos, and waving.  It felt funny, with all of the pomp and so many people waving at me, I felt like I should be giving a speech. 

            Eventually the street was sufficiently cleared, an hour after the chief minister was supposed to come by.  He got into a car, as we could see from the giant screens that would end up showing the speech to those gathered in the streets, and drove by.  To me that was it.  His car passed, followed by a long stream of what I can only assume of other officials’ cars.  The crowd went wild.  It was strange to see—we weren’t anywhere near the epicenter of the event, and yet we could certainly feel these people’s earth moving.  We found out later that this happens once a year, and that the villagers come into town for that one night and live it up.  The one interesting thing that happens in the year. 

            Robert and I left after the motorcade passed, having no desire to watch a man we didn’t know give a speech on a screen of dubious quality in a language we didn’t understand.  Went and got parota (like naan, but more filling and moist) from a dodgy hole in the wall restaurant.  Definitely one of those places they tell you not to eat if you don’t want to get sick.  By far the best we have had yet.  Major points to Abha Dascupta, who told me that the tastiness of the food I got here would be directly proportional to the sketchiness of the eating establishment, a theorem which my observations have generally supported.

            We decided to check out the debaucherous drinking that, according to the Tamil Nadu government on the labels of any kind of alcohol “destroys country, family, and life.”  I feel like their surgeon general is taking liberties.  We hung out around one of the wine shops for a while, watched men returning from the festivities exchanging tattered bills for warm beers, or harder stuff.  We asked a smaller, older man if he liked beer.  He shook his head, grinned at us with his remaining teeth, reached into the crotch of his pants and fished out a fifth of whiskey.  Or, more accurately, half of a fifth of whiskey.  We engaged in a philosophical discussion.  We wondered about the stairs just to the right of the wine shop, which led to a mysterious upper floor.  Alcohol-bearing men were constantly streaming up and down the stairs.

            Returned to our part of town, and decided to grab a beer at the local wine shop, considerably quieter and out of the rush of activity that engulfed the middle of town.  Met some students from Sastra, one of the universities that we had been researching, and had some very different conversations with them than we had had while interviewing students about their education financing.   Eventually they said that it was getting late for them, and that they had to go.  It was 10 o’clock.  It was OK, the bar was closing anyways.

            It was a fascinating experience.  So much more real than anything else that I’ve seen here.  There was only one other foreigner there.  More importantly, we were there for more or less the same reason everyone else was.  It wasn’t us observing and studying them, or at least not any more than they were observing each other.  We were all there for the spectacle, and it was honest.  I sat, uncomfortable on a cinderblock wall painted with political graffiti, and waited for a politician to briefly drive by.  I did that, and do did thousands of other people, whose lives would in all probability intersect just that once with mine.

            The next day was our last in Thanjavur.  First thing we did was get into a rickshaw, not the bus, and pay that $2.50 premium to get taken right to the temple.  So we made it after all, at the last possible minute.  There were ancient, intricate stone carvings.  There was an elephant.  We left for the city that night.