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)