Saturday, August 14, 2010

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment