God dag, earth

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!

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,

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,



This is my first “History Foundling” in a series called Time’s Lost & Found. 

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

 The larger series Time’s Lost & Found of course also consists of people, but since humans cannot be history foundlings, this part is called “In Fellowship Across Time”.

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.