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.