12. - 15.2. Four days in Auroville

 Some miles north of Pondicherry there is an international experimental town called Auroville.  We got to know about it by some German friends we had met in Agonda in Goa (Thank you, Martina and Jochen!) Here people of good will are realising community projects. The first we found was a bakery - with real bread and cake like in Germany! That was our place to have breakfast. And here we met two guys from Germany who wanted to know everything about our car and the trip. They invited us to come to their guesthouse and have a selfmade Marsalatea. And in that guesthouse in Yatra we met the next Germans and French and Indian people. We arrived just the correct day because that night was supposed to be a sing-along there.

At the visitors' centre of Auroville we had to make a date to be able to enter the Matrimandir, the "Temple of the Mother". As the first possible date was next Sunday we decided to stay at this spiritual place for four days and gain strength for the last weeks of our journey. Many people spend their holidays or even their lives here.

The Sing-Along that night was fun. We had some instruments, keyboard, drums, of course I brought my guitar and sang and danced lots of easy mantra-like Indian songs, that I will bring home to sing them in Hamburg with my choirs :)

We slept next to the guesthouse in our car under a tree.

The next days we spent at the beach and discovering different places in Auroville. 

On Saturday there was a festival with different circus workshops and at night dancing to Disco music from the eighties, played by a live band. 

We had the occasion to see an Indian film with English subtitles about life of an Indian tribe and how problems are solved with the wisdom of old Indian tradition. It reminded me a bit of what had happened to us after our accidents. The question was not "Who is guilty?" but to find a solution that is acceptable for everyone. And in the end you are asked "Are you happy?".

The centre where the Matrimandir was built was chosen by The Mother, the founder of Auroville. She put her finger on the map and it turned out to be a spot where a Banyantree is growing.
 That is a special tree with airroots growing from the tree's crown downwards making new trunks. At your first visit to Matrimandir they show a video about what Auroville was created for, bringing together people of all nations and religions to live together peacefully. The inside is all white, but through the golden plates on the outside it seems orange. We were given white socks to put on and were walking one after the other along stairs in the inside of the ball up to the meditation room, where we sat down on white pillows, all strictly quietly, for 10 minutes. The walking reminded me of science-fiction-movies, or the German Bundestag in Berlin where you also walk stairs up inside the "Kuppel". The good thing was the complete silence inside as contrapoint to the normal sensory overload in India.