Auroville has a movie theatre which seems to specialize in films no one ever heard of. But the screenings are free, the place is airconditioned, and sometimes there are real gems. Tonight’s offering was “A Sea of Trees”, which is about a man who goes to commit suicide in a Japanese forest that is a popular suicide spot. A special film.
June 2019
Pondicherry
Meanwhile in Pondicherry it was only 37 today. I took the moped there from Auroville in the morning to have a new pair of glasses made. I had my current pair made there too, 3 years ago. Eye tests seem to be growing more sophisticated all the time.
Running around Pondy on my moped, I discovered a nice book shop, where I bought Amitav Ghosh’s new novel “Gun Island” and two books by Michael Ondaatje. Gun Island is Ghosh’s first novel after his non-fiction book “The Great Derangement” – which was the one I was actually looking for. There he addresses the failure of artists and writers properly to address the Climate Emergency – he says that future generations will be mystified by its absence in the literature of our times. So “Gun Island”, according to reviews, does weave the Climate Emergency into its plot.
Afterwards I had a nice pasta and pineapple juice in an Italian-style restaurant where I was the only customer, and then stopped in at the Ashram to pay my respects to Sri Aurobindo and ‘the Mother’. On the way back, feeling desperate again for something cold, I stopped at Marc’s Cafe in Kuilapalayam, and had some amazing nitro cold-drip coffee, served in a wine glass. Really better than beer. The coffee is grown locally in the Western Ghats and roasted in Auroville.
Auroville
I’m in Auroville for a few final days before returning to Israel/Palestine. I’ve been coming here for several years now, though usually for a much longer period. This year I decided to spend the majority of my time in Tiruvannamalai.
Auroville is the utopian dream-child of Mira Alfassa, an alternative international township based on the ideas of human evolution by Aurobindo Ghose. Today around 2500 people live here from all around the world, and the community continues to grow. Last year it had its 50th anniversary.
It’s a beautiful and inspiring place, though not everyone’s cup of tea. Sometimes I fantasize about living here though I was thinking today that it has rather too many rules – it’s something that Aurovillians themselves sometimes say – rules of entry, rules of conduct, whatever. Otherwise it probably would not preserve its distinct character. I always think that its truly a miracle that the place continues to exist at all.
Auroville may declare itself an international township, and have a kind of unique status, but it must still abide by the laws of India. So, in addition to Auroville’s own painstakingly formulated rules, are the limitations placed on it, and on those who wish to reside here, by the Indian government, with its ever-changing visa immigration laws. On the one hand these are generous, yet on the other restrictive. The number of questions that I was asked in Chennai airport this time made me think that I would not return again to this country. If they wish to ask questions, let them do so before granting the visa, not at the port of arrival, please. I hear of multiple cases in which people are actually turned away at the border or sent back home.
The journalist Robert Fisk once convincingly compared visas to a disease. Of course, that’s just a statement of a privileged white man. I haven’t let border controls deter me from traveling places till now, but I think I’m finally growing weary of them, as well as the accompanying invasion of privacy.
Munnar and the Tea Museum
In Munnar i had some extra time so, for a lark, visited The Tea Musem, which traces.the origin of the plantations in the Western Ghats from the time of the British to the present time. Today , according to their film, the Kenan Devan Hills Plantations Company is 82% privately owned by the plantation workers themselves, and run with a bottom up management “the first and largest participatory management company in India, with 12,500 employees as shareholders “(2005). They have started to change over some of their plantations to organic teas and are doing research on organic methods. Unfortunately their teas, under the Ripple brand name, are available only in Kerala, according to the sales woman.
The man who gives the talk at the museum is an inspiring example of a person given a comparatively simple role of museum guide, but using it to advance a personal agenda to change the world. He started by saying that our lives would be permanently changed by his talk. He then launched on a deep discussion of the health benefits of green tea as a universal panacea. But he didn’t resrict himself just to tea, but advocated a healthy lifestyle that included yoga, cleansing of the bowels, proper ways to evacuate these and more. Daringly , for a tea company p.r. person, he pointed out that most indians have no idea how to make tea and were actually poisoning themselves with the stuff. He advocated a special green tea making device which is available in the gift shop by the exit. I think his talk was effective – i saw people buying it.
Appam
Appam – They brought me this for breakfast and it was the first time I’d had it. It’s quite vegan (made from fermented rice flour and coconut milk. South India has a wide range of breakfast possibilities. (https://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/appam-recipe-kerala-appam/)
Kindness
Most Indians are very kind. Like today I forgot my new phone at a tea house, and someone came calling after me to give it back to me.
Sometimes people will really go out of their way to be helpful. Once I arrived in a small town in a tribal area and hadn’t a clue how to get to a friend who lived somewhere in a nearby village. It was early morning and raining. So I sat down in a tea house and people started talking to me. Someone knew where my friend lived. He asked me to wait, went to borrow someone’s scooter, and took me there himself. It was about 20 minutes away. He wouldn’t accept any money either.
Libreoffice Endnotes
This book that I’m preparing for reprinting has two kinds of endnotes, one set goes at the end of each chapter and another is collected in an appendix. I’m not sure how to handle that second set in LibreOffice. There seem to be some third party extensions, but I don’t think this is their purpose. They are intended to help researchers in handling citations and bibliographies. They do seem interesting in themselves though. The one that I downloaded is called Zotero, and it is in the Debian repositories. I could imagine that this could be a powerful tool for writers and researchers.
But I’m still stuck with this problem of the endnotes. 🙁
Garbage
The tiny guest house (just three rooms I think) where I’m staying is set in a lovely location by a mountain brook, which seems to be unpolluted enough to allow fishing. The guest house itself is quite smart and tidy. There’s a nice hammock on the balcony outside my room and below the balcony there’s a big ugly pile of garbage, in fact a couple of piles, which aren’t exactly piles – it looks as if they just kind of empty the garbage over the side, and maybe eventually burn it, as they so often do in India, though I don’t see any signs of previous burning.
This reminds of one time when I was on one of those lovely Greek islands in the Cyclades, when I walked out of the charming little white village along the island roads, and sauntered into the island dumping ground.
But whether garbage, particularly plastic waste is seen or unseen, there isn’t a very successful way of handling it. Lately we’ve all been waking up to the fact that most of our plastics are actually non-recycleable*. They are either shipped off to remote parts of Africa or South East Asia, or they become part of landfills. In some parts of India they are beginning to restrict the availability of one time use plastics. Mumbai has banned them completely. But as a traveler it’s a bit hard to avoid buying items like plastic bottles. I have a Lifestraw water bottle, but I’m still a bit afraid of the tap water here. I’ve begun to favor unpackaged food items, like cakes from a bakery instead of items that come nicely packaged.
*”Where does your plastic go? Global investigation reveals America’s dirty secret” (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/17/recycled-plastic-america-global-crisis)
Destroyed libraries
For a depressing read, Wikipedia has an article on the great destroyed libraries of the world, from 206 BCE to 2015 CE. There seems to be no indication that libraries are any more immune to destruction in modern times, and it isn’t just Nazis or religious fanatics doing the burning. The British burned down the Library of Congress in 1812 and towards the end of the 19th century burned down the royal library in Burma. Leftists and anarchists burned many libraries in Spain in 1931. In Canada, in 2013 "scientific records and research created at a taxpayer cost of tens of millions of dollars was dumped, burned, and given away," under the government of Stephen Harper.
Alphabets
All the South Asian scripts owe their origins to the old Brahmi script which, like Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, etc. and most other alphabets is supposed to have come originally from proto-sinaitic inscriptions of which were discovered in 1904 in the Sinai peninsula. According to that theory, most alphabets have the same origin. "Many scholars link the origin of Brahmi to Semitic script models, particularly Aramaic.[25] The explanation of how this might have happened, the particular Semitic script and the chronology have been the subject of much debate. ”
The north Indian scripts are fairly similar to one another, but the scripts in which the southern Indian, Sri Lankan, Burmese and south east Asian languages are written differ quite a bit, so I wanted to compare them. Omniglot.com is a fantastic resource for this. I was surprised how easy it is to differentiate between the different scripts. Each has particular characteristics.
Kannada, spoken in Karnataka
Telugu, spoken in Andhra Pradesh
Khmer, used in Cambodia
Malayalam, used in Kerala
Thai script
Tamil, used in Tamil Nadu
Sinhala script, used in Sri Lanka
Burmese script
