God dag, earth

New Year’s was amazing. Svaram gave a wonderful performance at the Matrimandir, which I attended with friends I had made over the past weeks in Auroville. Probably the most beautiful New Year’s I have had!

At the start of last week I shifted to the Aurobindo Ashram Park Guest House. A beautiful guest house right next to the ocean. It’s a quiet corner in the loud streets of Pondicherry. Unfortunately, Pondicherry is no longer the sleepy town it was when Aurobindo arrived here in the early 20th century. Nowadays it is mostly domestic tourists posing in front of the colonial French gates for wedding pictures, and restaurants serving “colonial French cuisine”… Still, Pondy retains a lot of its charm for me, I love cycling through the old streets or running at sunrise on Rock Beach. So, on the first few days, I mostly cycled around, got some groceries, and bought Indian ink for calligraphy. The weekend I arrived, the International Yoga Festival was going on in Pondicherry, which meant there were many events and it was quite crowded. After work on Monday, I visited Arikamedu in the afternoon, which I made a separate post about.

At breakfast on Tuesday, I noticed a special and rather expressive lady ordering food in the Dining Hall of Park Guest House. As I tried to eat my breakfast in peace, she suddenly asked me where I was from. She immediately shared that she used to stay in Eindhoven and then asked what I was doing here in Pondicherry. I told her about my PhD topic on the role of certain ashramites in the peace movement, she lightened up and grabbed a book from her bag. As she brushed the dust off the book, I recognised the title Mayayogi by R.R. Diwakar (politician and founder of the Gandhi Peace Foundation). She started talking: “So my grandfather was very involved in the peace movement…” I thought: “She must be joking.” R. R. Diwakar is almost in all the archival material for my research! Then she pulled out several articles featuring her and her grandfather, which confirmed what she was saying: she was Deepti Diwakar, a peace worker herself, Miss India, and a Bharatanatyam dancer.

After breakfast I went to the office of the World Union. An organisation based on Aurobindo’s book Ideal of Human Unity. It had a big presence in international peace work in the 60s and 70s, before internal strife made them mostly inactive later on. Auro Ashish runs the organisation currently, and I had a lovely conversation with him. We talked about the different transformations in Aurobindo’s writings and how to see them next to each other (trigunatita, karma/bhakti/jnana, etc.). He was shocked that I knew details behind the history of the World Union, and he even wanted to propose me as an honorary member!

After some lunch at Suguru Spot, I went to the Aurobindo Ashram Archives and bumped into a German girl researching her family roots in Pondi. We had a chat. Afterwards, Heehs and I went through the Ashram Archive catalogue in search of correspondence and files on peace workers.

Wednesday and Friday, I drove to Auroville on my scooter. If you ever happen to travel between Pondy and Auroville, I strongly recommend driving on the old Auroville Road, it makes the journey a hundred times more pleasant than on the ECR. I met up with Shiju, and for lunch, I had agreed with Robert, another PhDer writing on “British Hippies”, to eat at Sudha’s Kitchen, which was fun!

Still, I’ve found rather little time to really be part of the ashram life in Pondicherry itself. There simply remains little time in a day because of Auroville and the archives… Instead, whenever I find some private time, I am currently reading Kierkegaard’s The Present Age. One of my favourite quotes that critiques our current attitude is this one:

“A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down; but a revolutionary age, that is at the same time reflective and passionless, transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialectics: it leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance. Instead of culminating in a rebellion it reduces the inward reality of all relationships to a reflective tension which leaves everything standing but makes the whole of life ambiguous: so that everything continues to exist factually by a dialectical deceit, privatissime, it supplies a secret interpretation - that it does not exist.”


P.S.: Only one photo of beautiful Pondicherry attached to this post?! I’m working on it… The photos I’ve taken of the stunning old streets of Pondicherry are on my TLR. But next week is Pongal, and I’ll take more casual photos of Pondy then, too.



After my workday today, I went on my bicycle to Arikamedu. I’d been told this was the famous Indo-Roman port on the east coast. In the 1940s, excavations by Wheeler uncovered a lot of pottery, jewelry, and beads, indicating extensive trade with the Roman Empire. Journal articles from the time hailed this as the decisive identification of the ancient Poduca or Poduke mentioned in The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and in Ptolemy’s work (see, for example, archive.org/details/i… , you can find Poduke on p. 8, and Poduca on the map at the end, the Periplus is easier to find yourself).

The bicycle ride there was quite nice: sunny, with the wind blowing through my blouse. The only thing that bothered me, of course, were the massive buses and trucks that would honk and rush by at a hair’s distance! See my picture for one of these approaching me.

Many visitors to Arikamedu confuse the current ruins with the Indo-Roman port town. As I understand it, these 18th-century red brick ruins are the remains of a French Mission House. Starting from the “French Mission House,” Wheeler began his excavations, which were later continued by others in the 1940s and 1980s. After the first set of excavations, the large number of Roman-influenced crafts convinced archaeologists that this must be the ancient Poduca. P. Z. Pattabiramin concluded quite triumphantly in 1945: “How really happy we are to have found back the town of Poduke which had a Roman factory in the territory of Pondicherry [sic].” (P. Z. Pattabiramin, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Arikamedu Excavation, 1945).

When I find time this week, I’ll go and see the excavated material at the Pondicherry Museum, after which I’ll edit this post. For now, though, the link between these ancient texts and maps and the excavations of the 1940s feels a bit hasty to me. In Pondicherry, it is commonly held as fact that Arikamedu (rather than, say, Pulicat, which some scholars have leaned toward) must be the Poduca of the Geographia or the Periplus. This feels more like an inference than an established fact. Still, the excavations are wonderful, and the revealed historical links of a trade network that probably lasted from the 2nd century BCE to perhaps even the 1800s are amazing. Fortunately, research showing a broadening period of trade activity at Arikamedu keeps expanding, and the link to the ancient trading port of Poduca is made more cautiously.


In the mangrove forest right next to the excavation site, I found these really funny crabs. They’re fiddler crabs. Some mangrove ecologists consider them ecosystem engineers. For example, their little tunnels are thought to be crucial for soil oxygen levels and water infiltration for mangrove tree roots. The male fiddler crab is especially funny to me because he has this lopsided, single giant claw, while the other claw is normal-sized. They wave it in their own rhythm: to impress the ladies, threaten other males, or get rid of excess body heat. There’s a funny article in BioScience about an urban myth surrounding the fiddler crab’s giant claw, you can read it here: academic.oup.com/bioscienc…

Hei, god dag,

In the fall of 2018, I was sitting in an atelier tucked away in one of the small alleyways of Suzhou, China. There, I calligraphed a phrase into bamboo paper. Despite taking calligraphy classes at Suzhou University, it was amateurish, as a keen eye will spot in the first picture…


More than seven years later, I ran into Shiju in Auroville, who proposed teaching me calligraphy. When she heard I had already learned some in Suzhou, she was overjoyed.


The phrase she proposed to calligraph first was one of the famous lines of the Analects, Book 4: 父母在, 不远游, 游必有方. The meaning of this phrase can be interpreted as follows: When your parents live, don’t travel far; if you travel, have a direction. As I was painting the characters, a sudden wave of emotion ran over me: When I wanted to leave the Netherlands for China in 2018, a plan, a direction, was a firm condition for going so far from home. The entire phrase brings together the complex balance I feel between filial love, piety, and spreading one’s wings. :)

Shiju also taught me the respective bone inscriptions. These cracked me up. This little guy reflecting the bone inscription of 游 seems to be taking a shower in the rain…

On the fourth picture I am drying my ink brush on the fan. The last two pictures are of Xu Fancheng, or Hu Hsu, a Chinese translator who lived at the Ashram and translated the Auroville charter into Chinese. I hope that one day my ink drawings might reach his standard! 


I was cycling down Auroville when suddenly a cow jumped out of a home. She was dragging a long rope with her, which had a log and branches attached to it at the end. In all her panic, she had multiple autos and scooters almost drive into her. I stopped my bicycle and, without any conversation, a stranger and I unanimously made it our mission to help the cow to her freedom. While I tried to calm down the cow, the girl screamed to a family next door to get a knife for us to cut the rope with. Failing to cut it with her pair of scissors, we finally cut off the rope with the log using the knife. When this was done, the girl and I thanked each other and went our own ways. As I cycled on, I tried to grasp what had just happened. The cow was severely malnourished, and the situation with the rope plus log made cutting it an obvious choice. At the same time, freedom will probably mean eating trash from the roadsides…

At the end of Auroville Road, I bought a DIY kettle, as they weren’t selling proper kettles anywhere. Basically, it’s only two rods heating water. It is exactly as dangerous as it sounds. That evening I came back to trying to boil my eggs with it, and instead the DIY kettle had exploded from the plug, leaving a suspicious dark silver dust behind it.

Though Monday wasn’t too eventful besides a wonderful lunch with some born-and-raised Aurovilians, Tuesday was truly out of the ordinary. I had my second class of Tamil in the morning. While I already had a bit of a weird feeling about the first class, in this second class something happened which I could have never thought up. The Tamil teacher seriously believed that I was fluent in Tamil and was trying to “play games” with him: the speed at which I was comprehending Tamil was simply not possible for a complete beginner. At first I tried to work with him and explain that I truly did not know any Tamil. But after some time it became clear to me that this was not going to work. We went to the head of the department and explained the situation. However, as we were both trying to explain our sides of the story, a tourist from the North of India walked into the room. Since he was on his phone and asking admittedly quite silly questions, the Tamil teacher became mad at him. When their fight subsided, the main administrator concluded that the Tamil teacher was not having a good day and that we were not a match. Since the other two Tamil teachers were fully booked for the next week, we decided that instead I could take classes with the Mandarin teacher to further improve my Mandarin. Shiju is the most amazing teacher, and I also give her son some English lessons in return.

When I got out of the language school, I was quite confused and upset by the whole situation. Though the upside was that I could consider myself a Tamil genius, I still disliked the entire interaction and false accusation. Before I could head back to the archives, I sat in the forest to recollect my mind. Then I had lunch at GOYO, a Korean lunch place. They have the best Korean food ever; she makes everything herself and even picks some of the vegetables from the mountains. The point of lunch there is that you eat it in silence: GOYO. When my stomach was full, I headed to the archives, worked for a few hours, and finished my day with a gym workout at Dehashakti. That day I realized how much I value having my community at the place that I am staying. Since we always eat dinner together in the guest house, it helped me process this eventful day by chatting with others about it.

On the day of Christmas Eve, I did archival work, went to a sound immersion at Unity Pavilion, and finished the day with another wonderful dinner and a long Christmas call with my family. On the days of Christmas, I hung out with friends and went to Sadhana Forest, which has its own update. Then, at the end of the week, I was at Matrimandir, and we attended a concert in Auroville on Saturday. The musicians were combining electronic soundscapes with a guy playing quite good violin!

Quotes I recently read:

“When we speak indeed of the errors of Nature, we use a figure illegitimately borrowed from our human psychology” and “What the practical man of today denies as absurd and impracticable is often enough precisely the thing that future generations set about realizing and eventually in some form or another succeed in bringing into effective existence” (Aurobindo, The Ideal of Human Unity)

“Self-love is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting” (Shakespeare, I think Henry V)

“As an older person, in relation to a child, can press its claim to such an extreme that it ends by actually weakening the mind … so also the Eternal can, in the imagination of an excitable person, make an attempt to push the temporal into madness” (Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart)

The similarities of sun worship, internationalism, and earth religion between the ancient Egyptian Akhet-Aten and Auroville have fueled speculation about a hidden, even occult, connection.


In the year 2000, Claire le Touzé was the first to put together all the information that linked these two cities in the minds of some Aurovilians. Ever since, there have been numerous booklets on the connection between Mirra Alfassa and Queen Tiye or Queen Hatshepsut, and between Akhet-Aten and Auroville.

To begin with the link between Mirra Alfassa and these two ancient Egyptian queens, we need to go back to some biographical aspects of Mirra in which she relates to both. Though not the first female ruler of Egypt, Hatshepsut was probably the first to hold full powers as a pharaoh. In many ways a child of French Egyptomania, Mirra Alfassa said she had encountered Hatshepsut’s toilet case in a museum at a young age and felt an immediate connection. Much later, when she was living in Pondicherry, she sometimes shared ideas and visions she had that related to ancient Egypt. She mentioned that she thought of ancient Egypt as an extremely occult age. Once, she had a dream in which her son was Akhenaten, or Amenhotep IV, making her Queen Tiye. The historical Akhenaten would become the ruler of Egypt who initiated one of the biggest and most intense periods of religious reform in human history. He attempted to change polytheistic Egypt into a culture devoted to the worship of the sun disk, also known as Aten. While Queen Tiye and Amenhotep III were already devoted to Aten, it was their son who implemented drastic religious change in ancient Egypt. Akhenaten, or “the one who is faithful to Aten,” wanted all of Egypt devoted to Aten.


The young couple Akhenaten and Nefertiti would found an entirely new city called Akhet-Aten, Horizon of Aten, or City of the Horizon. This city was dedicated to Aten, represented as the sun disk with little hands reaching out to humanity. The new city of Amarna (Horizon) has been linked to Auroville by Aurovilians in various ways. For example, Aurovilian Gilbert Lachaux has argued that Akhet-Aten, like Auroville, was meant to be an international and, in some sense, pacifist city. This idea was thought to be reconfirmed by the similarity between the Auroville Charter and Akhenaten’s proclamation at Akhet-Aten (see picture below from booklet, reference still needed -> will get it soon when I’m back at the archive). The worship of Aten likely took place without the usual ritualistic ceremonies, consisting instead of devotional hymns such as the Great Hymn to the Aten. Both cities share a nuanced form of monotheistic earth-centered religion. The worship of the sun disk in the main temple of Akhet-Aten also corresponds somewhat to that of the “sun temple” of Auroville, the Matrimandir. Lastly, Mirra Alfassa claimed that “Akhenaten’s revelation aimed at revealing to the humanity of their time the Unity of the Divine with its manifestations.” Such claims and surface similarities between Akhet-Aten and Auroville have left Aurovilians questioning and will likely continue to fuel speculation about a hidden link between these two fascinating cities.

For this week’s Peace Pasture Series, I visited a food forest and reforestation community called Sadhana Forest.

While it shares some aspects with other Auroville farms, such as Solitude or Terrasoul, Sadhana Forest felt exceptional in its thoroughness, breadth, and outreach. It was started by a family in 2003, not far outside of Auroville. More than 20 years later, the people of Sadhana Forest have managed to turn a plot of exhausted, barren land into a flourishing forest, practicing their motto of “putting compassion into action” for “world peace.”

Because of its success, there are now numerous branching projects of Sadhana Forest that have turned barren land into lasting food forests. Sadhana Forest Auroville is the mothership of, for example, three branches in Meghalaya, one in Haiti, one in Kenya, one in Namibia, one near Madurai, and soon probably one in Romania. :)

Although I usually leave such reforestation communes with my own thoughts, noticing many contradictions, I was impressed by the sincerity and upbuilding character of Sadhana Forest. While, of course, international long-term volunteers are running the place, they are provided for and foster genuine community. And, though many volunteers talk about the project in that hippie-esque, big-eyed fashion, it is pure enthusiasm, as there are no gurus and it is also a very strict substance-free community (two things that tend to create those Woodstock-type big eyes). The Sadhana community has also managed to nurture a strong bond with the local community through joint architectural projects and food sharing, which is tied to their giving philosophy of handing a free meal to any passerby at Sadhana Forest.

While being there, I learned about some of the key approaches to reforestation. Perhaps most crucially, the way the people of Sadhana Forest need to carefully “plant” water. Instead of thinking about where to plant trees, the real challenge with barren land is “planting” water, or making sure that rainwater does not run away. Since there are no roots to hold the water, barren land lets all water just run off, which keeps it barren. Although familiar with this issue, I had not made the connection that this meant reforestation projects were primarily about making small water dams and trenches. After the water is channeled correctly, trees come naturally.

Sadhana Forest also hosts a Goshala. Since their community is strictly vegan, they decided to still take care of cows meant for slaughter, simply to give them a good end to their lives. I had an interesting conversation with the guy showing me around Sadhana Forest, he talked to me about the “amount of violence in our diet,” a topic that immediately made me think of A.K. Bhagwat’s World Peace through Correct Diet. We spoke about the current situation in which dairy cows are likely living even worse lives than other farm cows, because of the constant use of their reproductive organs and the broken maternal connection (this holds for most large farm dairy cows, less so for the rare family farm that lets the calf grow up alongside taking their milk).

After walking around the farm, I had a lovely dinner with some friends that had come along to Sadhana. Sadhana Forest had cooked free meals for 200 people that evening, including volunteers and passersby. Someone told me that on peak days they give free meals to 1,300 people in a single day!

Hei, god dag,

A weekly update. This week I mostly spent time in the archives at Auroville. The most surprising find was about Sri Surendra Nath Jauhar, who after attending a session in Amritsar, joined the Congress and later the Arya Kumar Sabha, the youth wing of the Arya Samaj. After years of nonviolent resistance he turned to the Aurobindo Ashram in 1939 after traveling there with Indra Sen. His “supreme discovery” of the life-affirming ashram of Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa felt so true that, in his mid-fifties, he started the Delhi Branch of the Aurobindo Ashram and later a separate outpost in Nainital. He started the one in Nainital because people could learn trekking, mountaineering and get educated by the grandeur of the mountains! Speaking about mountains, the Unity Pavilion at Auroville had a wonderful art exhibition on mountains called “Wie im Großen, so im Kleinen” by Birgitta Volz. She made these artworks while in Pedvale Art Park, Latvia, and used oil colour to create the relief of the mountains on delicate Chinese paper.


On my way out of the archives I found a very sweet artwork on the evolution of the earth. I especially adored the Sauropod that was flying towards an erupting volcano in the Permian, and have been thinking about Sauropods since… 
 For some time, I have been wanting to go to a gym in Auroville. So I was more than happy to find Dehashakti gym. The day before, on Monday, I had gone to check out Turiya gym, but this urbanized giant felt completely out of place, which is why I was even happier to hear that Auroville has its own gym called Dehashakti. It has good, home-made equipment, and they only ask for a small contribution to use it!

This week I changed from New Creation to Center Guest House (feel free to reach out in case you ever stay in Auroville, I can give tips!). Although I already miss some of the people from the previous place, especially Vijaya, I’ve met some wonderful people here through our communal breakfast and dinner. Yesterday I also had my first Tamil class at the Auroville Language Lab with teacher Ashok. In the afternoon I drew a small plant bouquet in my room.


This morning I visited the Matrimandir one more time (it had been a week!), and afterwards went to Solitude Farm with two friends to have lunch. At Solitude Farm we spoke with the legendary Krishna Mckenzie, who has been spearheading local farm initiatives around the area for decades after he came to Auroville at 19. It was wonderful to see how inspired he was by Manasobu Fukuoka, a Japanese thinker and farmer. Yesterday night we all went to the Svaram performance at the amphitheater next to the matrimandir, which was part of the bigger literature festival held in Auroville. The setting at the amphitheater was stunning: The sun was slowly setting leaving a pink hue behind the golden globe, and flying foxes were cruising above us. Three members of Svaram created a soundscape while reading the five “dreams” of Aurobindo broadcasted in 1947 on All India Radio. Though an echo in the microphone slightly broke the flow between music and speech, it was a wonderful music performance!

In Unearth Kāla I uncover dead time. Kāla, or time, personifies the force destroying all things. This series of letters is there to remember them. This time: The “Planetary History” of the Krishna-Prometheus Project.

“Mankind is now moving into the era of the conquest of outer space”. Space technology is used for war on Earth, or to escape Earth from war, but far less often to prevent war. Yet the aim of the 1962 Krishna-Prometheus Satellite project was precisely this: To prevent our “descend downward and deathward toward collective insanity and mass suicide”. In 1962 at a now-forgotten yet revolutionary anti-nuclear conference, the Accra Assembly, “The World Without the Bomb”, Project Krishna-Prometheus was proposed by Julie Medlock and Oliver Reiser. Oliver Reiser was a philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh; Julie Medlock an evolutionist of the Aurobindo sort who had just quit her role as Bertrand Russell’s literary agent after a trip to a branch of the Aurobindo Ashram, and was now engaged in several active peace projects. The Accra Assembly was initiated early in 1961 by the “consideration” of Kwame Nkrumah, then president of Ghana. Its aim was concisely “summed up in its title ‘The World Without the Bomb’”. There was a truly global attendance at the conference, with speakers and participants like president Kwame Nkrumah, “father of radar” Sir Robert Watson-Watt, historian Joseph Ki-Zerbo, Nobel Prize winning physicist Abdus Salam, and antinuclear physicist Joseph Rotblat. They were insistent that this meeting against atomic warfare could not be “negative”, its aim had to be “positive”: to offer solutions forward into a more peaceful world without weapons of mass destruction. More will soon follow on the Accra Assembly by PhDers Henrike Vellinga and myself. For this “History Foundling”, I wanted to give a glimpse and focus on what was perhaps one of the most bizarre solutions proposed at the Assembly: The Krishna-Prometheus project

The project requested the UN to reach out to the Soviet Union and the US to jointly authorize and host a satellite project called Krishna-Prometheus. This satellite project would bring worldwide education to everyone’s fingertips. Although the primary aim was peace on earth, it had other “cosmic” humanist aims in terms of education and the eradication of poverty. The authors expressed an intense sense of urgency fearing that we otherwise might “lose the battle of man”.



The satellite would host educative television programs focusing on key personalities of the “East” and “West”. These key personalities were major thinkers, religious figures, or inventors, such as “Krishna, Akhenaten … Tagore, Gandhi, Bhave, Sri Aurobindo … Newton, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein, and Russell”. It was “in this manner that a good part of the planet would be covered: we would ‘put a girdle ‘round the earth’ - as Shakespeare foresaw eventually to bind the members of the human family into the form of unity.”



Although utopian, naive, and progressivist toward what they called “backward” peoples, the project was nevertheless revolutionary for its time. To redirect “the conquest” of outer space toward the union and perfection of the human race was laudable, and an early response to stil quite novel technological developments. At the time, satellites and space technology were still new, state controlled or subsidized, and often military-oriented. Hosted in June 1962, with the Cuban Missile Crisis just around the corner, they showed Promethean foresight! 



Although it is sill unclear to me, it is unlikely that the proposal was taken up at the United Nations or had any other afterlife (TBC…). It seems that Oliver Reiser went on to pursue other philosophical questions, while Julie Medlock went back to Pondicherry to join the newly emerging Auroville. Their Krishna-Prometheus project meant to bring “fire and light from the heavens above to the teeming billions of people here on earth”. Besides its hubris, the size of the Tower of Babel, I think it is telling that Julie and Oliver also remained silent on the sensitivity of the Greeks to the fate of Prometheus. A careful reader of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound knows that to bear Prometheus’ “yoke of punishment”, inflicted by the tyrant of the new gods for giving humans light, demands not only foresight but equally the perseverance of his “foolish stubbornness”!

Just for fun (and further reflection): Hermes vs. Oceanus giving advice to Prometheus… Hermes: for stubbornness standing alone is the weakest of all things in those with foolish minds (1254-1256) Oceanus: well, let me fall ill from this disease, for someone truly wise profits most when he is thought a fool. (484-486) I wonder what Krishna might have advised to our not so despondent Prometheus, Medlock, and Reiser!

Hei, god dag!

Just a small update on the last three days. I had been in Chennai at the end of this week to walk through the Theosophical Society in Adyar, get a haircut, buy some clothes, and pick up a TLR camera from the CPB Foundation.

When I got back to Auroville, I was pretty exhausted. Yet, after the Peace Pasture series I did on Saturday, Yasmin from AuroOrchard invited me to join her for two events that evening, which I had had no clue about. First was the opening of a Russian art exhibition at the Tibetan Pavilion by Alexander Pereverzev. Alexander gave a wonderful presentation for each artwork, and I particularly liked Seeing off Maslenitsa. Farewell to Winter. This piece is about the famous Butter Week celebrations, in which, on the last day, an effigy of Lady Maslenitsa is burned. Lady Maslenitsa, also called the Butter Lady or Morana, is linked to the ancient Slavic goddess of death. So death is burned… into spring!

Afterwards, we went to the Youth Centre, where they were holding a massive pizza night because they unfortunately have to relocate. There were so many people at this event. We had great pizza, made a fire and sat around it, talked with some elderly Aurovillians, and later watched the meteor shower with friends until after midnight on Gaia Field.

On Sunday I was still pretty tired, but when some of the people I had met asked me to join them at the beach, I couldn’t say no. It was my first time swimming in the ocean since Bergen aan Zee, and it made me incredibly happy. Afterwards, we went to eat at Malgudi Days (highly recommended for homely North Indian food in Auroville) and played cards to close the night.

Only three photos, I forgot to take more!

Peace Pastures #1

This peace pasture report is part of a series where I go by farms that I buy animal produce from. 



This blog series started because I began occasionally eating animal produce (at the moment eggs) again for nutrition but kept racking my brain over their ill-treatment, especially the treatment of “dairy” cows. At the end of this document I’ve given a brief take on my preliminary conclusions as to why we should visit farms to see farm animals with our own eyes. In short, it’s to see the bullshit these animals go through, to choose farm produce with a heart, and to ensure the worthy continued existence of farm animals.


On the Saturday afternoon of 13 December, I visited four farms. It was a long journey as I am doing these farm visits on my bike. During these visits I mostly focus on ducks, chicken, and cows (see list below on what I check). I visited them in the afternoon and since this is eating time, the cows were all in the stall. Next time, I am visiting in the morning to get both sides. I’ll start with the biggest farm and move down to the smallest. But before I continue I want to give a special thanks to AuroOrchard and Yasmin as she treated her four cows, held for manure only, so well! She taught me what to look out for at farms. And besides this, Yasmin, a great elderly lady, invited me to join to a Russian art exhibition and free pizza party night in Auroville!



The following more extensive report is quite boring as I try to make them based on a checklist. I share it for inspiration and because some people here asked cause they also wanted to know. Since I only checked farms that I buy produce from or that are related to the Aurobindo Ashram/Auroville, these farms are relatively speaking already very high standard!


AuroOrchard farm

Manure Cows Space: very spacious, Resting: not checked, Air quality: very fresh, Water: good, Body condition: good, Feet & movement: no hock lesions, gait good, Cleanliness: completely clean udders, Behavior & handling: very calm around farmer, Infrastructure: high standard

Ducks Space: excellent space, Resting: not checked, Air quality: no ammonia smell, Water: not checked, Body condition: not checked, Feet & movement: not checked, Cleanliness: great feather condition, Behavior & handling: very calm, Infrastructure: high standard



Sri Aurobindo Ashram farm

Cows Space: good space and stall availability, Resting: slightly muddy standing area, cows comfortable lying down, Air quality: no ammonia smell, Water: good, Body condition: one or two cows slightly underfed, Feet & movement: no hock lesions, gait ok, Cleanliness: clean udders, Behavior & handling: not very calm handling, not problematic, Infrastructure: functional stalls 
 Annapurna Auroville farm


Cows Space: less stall space than expected, Resting: no resting in stalls seen, Air quality: no ammonia smell, Water: good, Body condition: very well fed, Feet & movement: no hock lesions, gait not checked, Cleanliness: very clean udders, Behavior & handling: slight panic when approached, Infrastructure: adequate but space-limited

Ducks Space: overcrowded, no ability to be alone, Resting: litter not dry, Air quality: slight ammonia smell, Water: bad quality, Feed & body condition: okay, Movement and feet: medium, Cleanliness: feather condition not good, Infrastructure: too small enclosure

Terrasoul farm (chickens), not complete Space: large accessible area, Behavior: appeared healthy, calmness not fully assessed, Infrastructure: cage not finished

For farm animals to live a life that is worth living, and for humans to eat good food, there must be a harmonious relationship between animals and humans. This means knowing our farmers and the conditions under which animals are raised. Practically speaking, occasional consumption of animal produce (manure, eggs, hunting/emergency slaughter, and milk although milk is almost impossible to take non-cruelly from the cow!) will be the main viable way domestic farm animals can continue to exist. 
At the same time, domesticated animals, humans included, tend to be especially sensitive and are capable of forming deep and lasting bonds. For these two reasons, the only real justification for the existence of domestic animals, compared to having nature take back over, lies in a genuinely respectful and harmonious relationship between humans and animals. So far this has been rare.


If such a relationship cannot be achieved then dietary ahimsa becomes the only heartfelt option. This choice would also mean accepting the eventual disappearance of most domestic animal life. Two things I don’t stand for. Whether one is motivated by a heart for animals (also those held for manure for plants), personal health, environmental responsibility, the conclusion is the same: one must personally know and inform oneself about the conditions of the farm from which one’s animal produce comes.


Here are two quotes by a writer who I cherish, that, perhaps counterintuitively, got me thinking about this more: 
 “In all ages there have been people who wished to ‘improve’ mankind… To call the taming of an animal “improving it”, sounds to our ears almost like a joke. He who knows what goes on in menageries, doubts very much whether an animal is improved in such paces. It is certainly weakened, it is made less dangerous, and by means of the depressing influence of fear, pain, wounds, and hunger, it is converted into a sick animal. And the same holds good of the tamed man whom the priest has ‘improved’”



“We have altered our standpoint. In every respect we have become more modest. We no longer derive from the ‘spirit,’ and from the ‘godhead’; we have thrust him back among the beasts… now man is the great arrière pensée of organic evolution! He is by no means the crown of creation, beside him, every other creature stands at the same stage of perfection… And even in asserting this we go a little too far; for, relatively speaking, man is the most botched and diseased of animals, and he has wandered furthest from his instincts.” (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, The “Improvers of Mankind”, 2 & The Antichrist, 14)



I now focus on the following, please let me know if I missed something

Space (movement, ability to be alone) Resting (bedding dryness, comfort of lying down) Air quality (ammonia, ventilation) Water (cleanliness, species appropriate) Feed & body condition Feet/Legs (gait, hocks/footpads) Cleanliness (udders/feathers/etc.) Behavior (calmness, panic, flow) Infrastructure (safe, finished) 


With all the good memories of Hamilton still in my head I was dropped off by Siobhan early morning for a long journey to Madurai. After Irish set dancing, nearly two full days of travel from Toronto, and a complete reversal of my internal clock, I felt utterly exhausted when I finally arrived in Madurai.

When my energy returned, I visited the Gandhi Memorial Museum, as I hoped to consult their extensive library. While their website highlights that they are one of the largest libraries on Gandhian and peace studies, it failed to mention that the library was under renovation… The gallery attendant there pointed me toward a temporary library next to the museum. As I made my way over, passing a giant dinosaur, I found a small temporary reading room stocked only with newspapers from recent years. I decided I had to give up on the library and instead checked out the peculiar temporary exhibition. Right beside it, you can still find Gandhi’s ashes, which gave me chills! The rest of the day I hung out at the lovely and open library of the Theosophical Society in Madurai. You can simply walk in, write down your name, and read any old book that’s in their shelves. No questions asked! To me, it seemed they truly took to heart one of my favourite dictums from Harold Bloom: read and write “not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”!

The next morning I woke up early to visit the Meenakshi temple before sunrise, to have a calm experience there. The temple corridors and carvings are stunning. The distant glimpses I caught from the Garbhagriha (literally womb chamber, but it’s used kind of in the sense of a Sanctum Sanctorum) and the deities were beautiful. As I was walking down one of the massive, mostly empty, corridors, the rhythms of drums and mridangams heightened and a throng of ecstatic devotees passed by. While temple animals are a common sight in India, I hadn’t seen an elephant provide blessings. This horrid sight of who I think must have been Parvathi chained and having to give blessings throughout the day confirms the unfortunate hypocrisy of animal worship. Although I understand that her eye infection and domesticated life make her unfit for the wild, any sensitive nature would find this state a perversion of religion - der Erde treu.

After some breakfast, I made my way to Madurai Junction to take the train to Rameswaram, another name for Rama-isvaram, “Lord of Rama”. This name hints at the deity of Rameswaram’s main Ramanathaswamy temple: the destructive Lord Shiva. The story goes that Rama prayed to Shiva before he went to war with Ravana, as he was a devotee of Shiva. Upon victory, Rama returned with Sita and worshipped again at Agni Teertham to absolve himself from Brahmahatya (Ravana was a Brahmin by birth). This 12th-century Pandya dynasty temple hosts, it is said, the longest temple corridors of 1.2 kilometers! Nowadays most people visit Rameswaram mostly by land, for example, as a pilgrimage to one of the four dhams. However, until 1964, Rameswaram remained a major transit point by sea, dating back to the colonial era. It used to connect Sri Lanka and India by a famous boat mail service, and operate as a relatively big sea port town. The Hindu reports that Bal Gangadhar Tilak and S. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar took the train, and also mentions the Alavadar Murder Case of 1952 on the train. While the train is still “active”, I took the Amritha Express on the same route. By coincidence, I was reading Savitri Devi’s travelogue L’Étang aux Lotus on the Amrita Express, she was both an Axis spy and a deep ecologist. Her first encounter with India at Rameswaram, like many firsts for travellers to India at the time, is described in it in third person: De toute façon, les préjugés que le missionnaire professe à son égard sont la barrière qui le sépare de l’Inde, à tout jamais.Mais, de temps en temps, perdu au milieu de la foule des touristes, des fonctionnaires anglais, et des gens d’affaires de toutes nationalités, débarque à Bombay, ou sur la plage déserte de Dhanuskodi, un inconnu sans prétentions : c’est un pèlerin… Tout l’exalte, mais rien ne l’étonne, pas même les grandioses corridors, les interminables enfilades de piliers, les immenses porches, incroyablement sculptés, du premier temple hindou qu’il voit de ses yeux, à Rameswaram. However, Dhanushkodi was no longer a transit point after 1964 when a major cyclone hit the area, which turned it into an eerie ghost town at the “last road of India”! At the time I was there, Ditwah was battering parts of Sri Lanka and approaching Tamil Nadu, and Dhanushkodi was already flooded by heavy rains…

Hei, god dag,

Personal update, 20–25 November 2025

Writing these notes on my way from Toronto to Madurai… The last days were truly some of the warmest and most welcoming travel days!

Very early in the morning of 20 November I left Washington DC and Daniele for the Bertrand Russell Archives in Hamilton. No time for lunch, so I quickly snacked on a roasted sweet potato (with me just wondering how this, to me, so Chinese winter snack of 烤地瓜, arrived in Hamilton!). Upon arrival at the archive, I was greeted by the wonderful Bridget Whittle. I felt slightly embarrassed for carrying all my stuff, including my suitcase, into the archive. Luckily there wasn’t anyone else yet except Bridget. Bridget helped me tremendously in getting through the first day of my sources! At some time I got to meet Kenneth Blackwell, who I later found out worked for Russell and was himself present in many archival files too! After closing time, Kenneth invited me upstairs to have a “cuppa” with Andrew Bone, after which Andrew drove me to the family I was staying with for the days in Hamilton.

When I got to opening the front door, I saw James and Siobhan opening a little cage with an almost fluid pup trying to walk his way out of the cage. Soon the new pup would be called Lucy. I was truly beyond tired, but still had to eat. Since Siobhan was driving somewhere, she dropped me at the supermarket, where I got some food for the night.

The next day was another one at the archives with many findings about Julie Medlock, a woman who used to be Russell’s literary agent in the 50’s until a trip to India turned her towards the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, which she thereafter propagated at the antinuclear Accra Assembly she set up in Ghana.

That evening, Siobhan and James invited me to eat with their friends and daughter. It was such a great night! I chatted away with Rowan, and we sang Prince and Johnny Cash songs over them playing the guitar until late in the night. Saturday I went to the Falls; I drove with Siobhan and her friend there, and the Falls were indeed overwhelmingly beautiful. Sunday to Toronto, where I walked into a massive Christmas parade and had some delicious ramen. At night, the three of us discussed our crazy lives, love lives, and barbershop quartet singing.

Since Monday was already my last day in Hamilton, I had to go through my archival boxes at rapid speed! I think I never made this many scans in such a short time. After the archives closed, we watched some Paul McCartney videos as he played in Hamilton two nights before and Andrew had gone! Then I had promised to cook for Siobhan and James, so I made some Chinese dishes, after which I joined Siobhan and her friends at the first Irish Set Dancing Class of my life, which was wonderful!

Hei, god dag,

Here is a small photo update. These were taken in the maze of pathways in and around Auroville forest. A forest I traverse every day to go to the Auroville Archives. One of my favourite things to do since I arrived here has been to ride my bicycle through these passages. It leaves me with a powerful calm. Although these photos are of forests, below I added some lines about woods by two writers I cherish:

It was a good place for me; I could lie down on the ground at meals, instead of sitting upright on a chair; I did not upset my glass there. In the woods I could do as I pleased; I could lie down flat on my back and close my eyes if I pleased, and I could say whatever I liked to say. Often one might feel a wish to say something, to speak aloud, and in the woods it sounded like speech from the very heart…

(Knut Hamsun, Pan, p. 41)

I robbed the Woods—

The trusting Woods.

The unsuspecting Trees

Brought out their Burs and mosses

My fantasy to please.

I scanned their trinkets curious—I grasped—I bore away—

What will the solemn Hemlock—

What will the Oak tree say?

(Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, p. 24)

Hei, god dag,



This is my first historical “foundling”. 

In these posts I share notes on things I find out about a place, person, or event that surprise me and I had no clue about before. Maybe you didn’t know either, and if so, help me care for the foundling with your memory so that it is not forgotten…



20.10.2025



In between all the warm Diwali celebrations, I bumped into the first historical “foundling”, which is actually hard to miss when you are in Ayodhya: Queen Huh (?) Memorial Park. While Ayodhya is mostly visited now because of the new Ram Temple constructed on the site where the Babri Masjid stood until 1992. Nestled between the bustle of Sarayu Ghat, Ram Ki Paidi, and a new construction site for who knows what, there is a garden with a pavilion dedicated to Korea-India ties that, it is said, stretch back 2,000 years!



When I walked into the garden, the first thing I noticed is poor spatial harmony. But if you walk over the bridge, there sits a beautiful pavilion reflecting the Joseon-architectural style of Changdeok Palace! 

So many questions came to mind, but crucially: why is there, in the middle of Ayodhya, a Joseon-style pavilion?

The answer merges myth with history. According to Il-Yeon’s “Samguk Yusa (1281)”, King Suro, the legendary founder of the Gaya confederacy 2,000 years ago on the Korean Peninsula, married Princess Suriratna of “Ayuttha”. The plaque next to the Korean Pavilion concludes, in Korean, Hindi, and English, that Suriratna, after a divine dream, must have sailed “4500 km across the sea to become the Queen of Garak”. 



However, when I first heard the name Ayuttha, I immediately thought of an entirely different city almost 2000 km east of Ayodhya: Ayutthaya! It turns out there is an ongoing scholarly debate on where Queen Heo Hwang-ok truly came from. Rana P.B. Singh and Sarvesh Kumar give a nice overview of it in Interfacing Cultural Landscapes between India and Korea. 

In 2000, Ayodhya and Gimhae were designated as sister cities. In 2001, a Korean delegation allegedly accompanied by the North Korean ambassador to India came to inaugurate the memorial. As hinted at in the chronological overview, over the years the park has gone through various remodelings. 


Hei, god dag!



In the first two months of archival work I’ve been lucky to meet so many interesting characters and new places. And, since close-ones were asking for more elaborate updates, I thought it’d be nice to start a mini-blog. This will be (hopefully) an update every third day (+book, flower, quote), separate posts on a historical “foundling”, and maybe even random pictures! As I will also do some backlogging, blogs probably won’t be chronological. The goal is to be consistent but I don’t want blogging time to interfere too much with new encounters!



3-9 December 2025


After some truly hectic traveling to get to Pondicherry, the 3rd of December I finally got rest as I checked into my first guest house in the Pondi area: New Creation. The mural pictures are from here. Even though my booking request through Auroville had ended in their spam email, Meera Bhai and the others at the guest house were still ready to give the warmest welcome upon my arrival! There are many dogs, and a few cats, roaming around the wonderful garden with lotus pond. As an Auroville project it also supports a boarding, primary, and preschool in the area, one of them being right next to the guest house. 


After settling in, getting a Kinisi e-bike, and having some rare quality bread at the Auroville bakery (separate bakery update upcoming), I headed to the Auroville archives to start some work. After a year, I got to reconnect with the wonderful and funny archivist Varun and we almost straightaway found out about the World Union journal, with a lot of relevant information for my research!


Saturday was my first time in Auroville’s golfball, aka the Matrimandir. All in all, the visit felt genuine and refreshing. The many Aurovillians who guide you through the temple are wonderfully diverse, blending 70’s New Age with an almost antique sense of devotional temple service. After a brief introduction, you enter the temple through the East gate and through a spiral stairway go to the inner chamber. The inner chamber is completely white-ish, surrounded by pillars, and has a translucent ball on top of four Aurobindo-styled shatkonas, through the glass sphere sunshine is re-directed by a heliostat on top of the temple. Focusing your meditation on the glass ball in the middle induces an optical illusion where the entire room blackens, and people turn to shadows. 
 For the rest of the days, I took it easy, drove around the unending and serene pathways around Auroville on my bicycle, and spent one day at Aurobeach. Thanks to Auroville’s openness, I got to know a lovely French couple over my breakfasts at the kitchen, a witty Russian lady who is also working at the archives, and Uma who created Upasana!



A book recommendation from my reading on Aurobeach is H.G. Wells’ The World Set Free. It is a chilling yet hilarious prediction on the potential of nuclear catastrophe written in 1913, a time when atomic bombs still seemed a total fantasy to many!



Just now I saw Meera Bhai standing with a flower, which her friend gave to me. It is a Pigeon Orchid (first photo), a small flower that was probably named as such because it somewhat resembles a pigeon. The funny thing about this flower is that its flowering is “gregarious”, if you’re in need of a refresher on what this means you can read this 1922 paper The Gregarious Flowering of the Orchid Dendrobium Crumenatum.

While I was reading K.D. Sethna’s The Indian Spirit and the World’s Future today in the archive, I found this beautiful line he quotes from Tacitus: “Ubi solitudinem faciunt, paces appellant”, often rendered as “They make a desert and call it peace”, although “desert” could just as well be “solitude”. Sethna compares it to the dead peace of colonialism. Tacitus put the words in General Calgacus’s mouth to inspire courage in his troops, yet the line is also read as a critique of the desperation created by imperial politics. To me, it additionally rang psychologically true of false solitude!

Hei, god dag,

History Foundling #2, 05.12.2025



On my third day in the Auroville archives, as I was leafing through the World Union journals, I came across an interesting yet almost forgotten exchange between an anti-nuclear sailing voyage and an Indian ashram. In 1977, Judy Ferris writes about how the Fri Peace Odyssey came into contact with the Aurobindo Ashram!



The Fri Peace Odyssey was a flotilla that sailed for three years tens of thousands of kilometers to spread the message of peace and protest the French Government’s nuclear weapons test site at Moruroa Atoll. The mother ship in the flotilla was a ship called “Fri”. This ship had an adventurous life before being part of the flotilla. You can read all about it here: web.archive.org/web/20070… Originally it was a Baltic trader that had sailed until 1968 with coal, cement, and ceramic drainpipes, until it went with beer and whiskey to be part of the San Francisco Maritime Museum, which rejected it, and it instead supplied Native Americans who occupied Alcatraz to focus on their land rights with water and supplies.



In 1973, David Moodie and Emma Young agreed that Fri would be the mother ship of the flotilla to protest French nuclear weapon testing, especially in Moruora. Judy Ferris writes that it had a crew of thirteen young people from the U.S., New Zealand, India, Japan, Germany, Canada, and Switzerland, and that they got notice of the flotilla in the Aurobindo Ashram, as it had boarded in Madras (present-day Chennai). The World Union International Centers and its headquarters in Pondicherry had reached out with an invitation to come to Pondicherry, but the winds did not allow this anymore. Instead the ship sent two of its crew members by bus to Pondy. At breakfast in the dining room of the Aurobindo Ashram she talked with two of the crew members who had recently joined the voyage in Indonesia. They shared positive experiences they had had with the Indian Navy, who repainted their boat, and Russians in the Soviet Union, who were surprised Westerners wanted peace and provided them with provisions and major repairs.



Then on the next morning Fri actually sailed into Pondicherry! They had tried with their harbour engine, but suddenly a northern wind carried them to Pondicherry. The crew members joined in on a “Cercle de Pondicherry” hosted by the World Union organisation. The Aurobindo Ashram provided them with books by Sri Aurobindo, meals at the Dining Room, and their tired bodies with homeopathic treatment by its doctors. A tree for peace was planted at Utilité (and later in the botanical gardens). Some crew members worked a few days in Auroville, and some Aurovilians went on board when the ship sailed off again to Sri Lanka.

Judy finishes her account with the following sentence: “It is the sea that is one unbroken mass touching most all the countries of the earth, and Fri, sailing from point to point on that sea, weaves one more invisible thread to draw men closer together."



I’ll still edit this post if I can find a picture of the peace tree at Utilité or the botanical gardens and/or more information in the Auroville archives on this exchange!

With all the good memories of Hamilton still in my head I was dropped off by Siobhan early morning for a long journey to Madurai. After Irish set dancing, nearly two full days of travel from Toronto, and a complete reversal of my internal clock, I felt utterly exhausted when I finally arrived in Madurai.

When my energy returned, I visited the Gandhi Memorial Museum, as I hoped to consult their extensive library. While their website highlights that they are one of the largest libraries on Gandhian and peace studies, it failed to mention that the library was under renovation… The gallery attendant there pointed me toward a temporary library next to the museum. As I made my way over, passing a giant dinosaur, I found a small temporary reading room stocked only with newspapers from recent years. I decided I had to give up on the library and instead checked out the peculiar temporary exhibition. Right beside it, you can still find Gandhi’s ashes, which gave me chills! The rest of the day I hung out at the lovely and open library of the Theosophical Society in Madurai. You can simply walk in, write down your name, and read any old book that’s in their shelves. No questions asked! To me, it seemed they truly took to heart one of my favourite dictums from Harold Bloom: read and write “not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”!

The next morning I woke up early to visit the Meenakshi temple before sunrise, to have a calm experience there. The temple corridors and carvings are stunning. The distant glimpses I caught from the Garbhagriha (literally womb chamber, but it’s used kind of in the sense of a Sanctum Sanctorum) and the deities were beautiful. As I was walking down one of the massive, mostly empty, corridors, the rhythms of drums and mridangams heightened and a throng of ecstatic devotees passed by. While temple animals are a common sight in India, I hadn’t seen an elephant provide blessings. This horrid sight of who I think must have been Parvathi chained and having to give blessings throughout the day confirms the unfortunate hypocrisy of animal worship. Although I understand that her eye infection and domesticated life make her unfit for the wild, any sensitive nature would find this state a perversion of religion - der Erde treu.

After some breakfast, I made my way to Madurai Junction to take the train to Rameswaram, another name for Rama-isvaram, “Lord of Rama”. This name hints at the deity of Rameswaram’s main Ramanathaswamy temple: the destructive Lord Shiva. The story goes that Rama prayed to Shiva before he went to war with Ravana, as he was a devotee of Shiva. Upon victory, Rama returned with Sita and worshipped again at Agni Teertham to absolve himself from Brahmahatya (Ravana was a Brahmin by birth). This 12th-century Pandya dynasty temple hosts, it is said, the longest temple corridors of 1.2 kilometers! Nowadays most people visit Rameswaram mostly by land, for example, as a pilgrimage to one of the four dhams. However, until 1964, Rameswaram remained a major transit point by sea, dating back to the colonial era. It used to connect Sri Lanka and India by a famous boat mail service, and operate as a relatively big sea port town. The Hindu reports that Bal Gangadhar Tilak and S. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar took the train, and also mentions the Alavadar Murder Case of 1952 on the train. While the train is still “active”, I took the Amritha Express on the same route. By coincidence, I was reading Savitri Devi’s travelogue L’Étang aux Lotus on the Amritha Express, she was both an Axis spy and a deep ecologist. Her first encounter with India at Rameswaram, like many firsts for travellers to India at the time, is described in it in third person: De toute façon, les préjugés que le missionnaire professe à son égard sont la barrière qui le sépare de l’Inde, à tout jamais.Mais, de temps en temps, perdu au milieu de la foule des touristes, des fonctionnaires anglais, et des gens d’affaires de toutes nationalités, débarque à Bombay, ou sur la plage déserte de Dhanuskodi, un inconnu sans prétentions : c’est un pèlerin… Tout l’exalte, mais rien ne l’étonne, pas même les grandioses corridors, les interminables enfilades de piliers, les immenses porches, incroyablement sculptés, du premier temple hindou qu’il voit de ses yeux, à Rameswaram. However, Dhanushkodi was no longer a transit point after 1964 when a major cyclone hit the area, which turned it into an eerie ghost town at the “last road of India”! At the time I was there, Ditwah was battering parts of Sri Lanka and approaching Tamil Nadu, and Dhanushkodi was already flooded by heavy rains…

God dag,

Writing these notes on my way from Toronto to Madurai… The last days were truly some of the warmest and most welcoming travel days!

Very early in the morning of 20 November I left Washington DC and Daniele for the Bertrand Russell Archives in Hamilton. No time for lunch, so I quickly snacked on a roasted sweet potato (with me just wondering how this, to me, so Chinese winter snack of 烤地瓜, arrived in Hamilton!). Upon arrival at the archive, I was greeted by the wonderful Bridget Whittle. I felt slightly embarrassed for carrying all my stuff, including my suitcase, into the archive. Luckily there wasn’t anyone else yet except Bridget. Bridget helped me tremendously in getting through the first day of my sources! At some time I got to meet Kenneth Blackwell, who I later found out worked for Russell and was himself present in many archival files too! After closing time, Kenneth invited me upstairs to have a “cuppa” with Andrew Bone, after which Andrew drove me to the family I was staying with for the days in Hamilton.

When I got to opening the front door, I saw James and Siobhan opening a little cage with an almost fluid pup trying to walk his way out of the cage. Soon the new pup would be called Lucy. I was truly beyond tired, but still had to eat. Since Siobhan was driving somewhere, she dropped me at the supermarket, where I got some food for the night.

The next day was another one at the archives with many findings about Julie Medlock, a woman who used to be Russell’s literary agent in the 50’s until a trip to India turned her towards the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, which she thereafter propagated at the antinuclear Accra Assembly she set up in Ghana.

That evening, Siobhan and James invited me to eat with their friends and daughter. It was such a great night! I chatted away with Rowan, and we sang Prince and Johnny Cash songs over them playing the guitar until late in the night. Saturday I went to the Falls; I drove with Siobhan and her friend there, and the Falls were indeed overwhelmingly beautiful. Sunday to Toronto, where I walked into a massive Christmas parade and had some delicious ramen. At night, the three of us discussed our crazy lives, love lives, and barbershop quartet singing.

Since Monday was already my last day in Hamilton, I had to go through my archival boxes at rapid speed! I think I never made this many scans in such a short time. After the archives closed, we watched some Paul McCartney videos as he played in Hamilton two nights before and Andrew had gone! Then I had promised to cook for Siobhan and James, so I made some Chinese dishes, after which I joined Siobhan and her friends at the first Irish Set Dancing Class of my life, which was wonderful!

“It’s better if you go to the doctor!” Henrike insisted, as she was preparing to present her conference talk, “A Missing African Peace?”, at the Peace History Society. I really did not want to miss her talk, yet the condition of my body was seriously starting to get to my head. Henrike gave me her phone in case , and I left for the hospital. At the emergency department, I described what I had been dealing with over the past week: how my joints had felt paralysed, my mind split open as if by a sledgehammer, and the constant feverish highs and lows. “It must be malaria” I heard one of the doctors whisper. Internally, I shook my head. The whole situation felt a bit absurd, as it seemed they were there to make me undergo as many medical procedures as possible (for example, an X-ray, which I politely declined) for the sake of “broad screening.” Aside from the astronomical prices, this broken medical system also appeared not to have heard of Dengue or Chikungunya… Though they could not test for what I was hoping for, the results still brought relief. The only things they found were food-poisoning bacteria and broken-down muscle tissue.

I went back to the conference, joined the keynote talk, and afterwards we drove back to our place in Georgia. Every day we made the same drive back and forth to the conference at Berry College. On the way back to our place, we always knew exactly which turn to take because there was a raccoon lying by the roadside in permanent rigor mortis.

The next day, Carolien, Daniele, and I were scheduled to speak in the afternoon. Despite the sickness, I felt a stubborn desire to present my paper. I had come so far from Uruli Kanchan and prepared it, why not do it? The three of us were on the same panel, with Michael Clinton from Gwynedd as chair and commenter. Carolien introduced our project and spoke about Gandhigram, the India–China Friendship March of 1963, and others that highlighted the global character of the peace movement. Daniele gave a talk on peace and decolonization in the Maghreb, focusing on the role of trade unionists, the Comité tunisien pour la défense de la paix, and the (attempted) unity between nationalists and communists. I was content with my own talk too.

That evening, an enormous sense of relief came over me, both because of the hospital test results and because the talk was behind me. We celebrated by having dinner at a Thai place, with a lovely and funny lady behind the counter, and then going to a screening at the international film festival in Rome: Coroner to the Stars.

With the conference behind us, we were meant to make our way to the Swarthmore Peace Collection in Philadelphia. Upon arriving at Atlanta airport, Henrike and I discovered that our flights had been canceled due to the government shutdown. With a rapid change of plans, we managed to get onto another flight and ran to its final boarding call, this one was heading to Baltimore. From there, we took a train to Philadelphia.

As we walked toward Swarthmore College next morning, with the crisp air blowing into my face, I vividly remember how much I enjoyed being in the USA with our team. The next few days mostly consisted of walking to the archive, working through materials at the Swarthmore Peace Collection, and walking back again. Most days I walked and chatted with Pratika, we share a similar walking speed and sense of humor. On the archive, our entire team agreed that this was probably the most well-organized and well-prepared one any of us had worked in. On the second day, we had a lunch in Swarthmore’s main dining hall (so many options!) together with members of the Swarthmore Archives. Since Daniele and I were heading to Washington DC that Saturday, we decided to visit Philadelphia on a weekday evening. Pratika joined us, and we took a long stroll through the city, followed by a delicious dinner at a Korean restaurant. One evening we also went out to eat with Michael Clinton and Scott Bennett at a Chinese restaurant, then, we ended the night at a cozy jazz café. Finally, a favorite part of the trip was playing Punto with our team in the evening. 🙂