Monica

Last weekend was fantastic. Maya's college friend Monica is in India right now visiting her family in Delhi and she contacted me and asked if she could come visit and see Chennai. She came last Thursday and I picked her up at the airport in a ricksaw and we got back to my apartment and started planning the weekend. I couldn't really figure out where to take her because even though Chennai is a big city, there aren't really any tourist attractions here. I mean, how many shopping centers and malls can you take someone to? So what did we end up doing? Going back to Golden Sun resort of course. Why not?

Robert, Shasta, Monica and I took the bus to Mahabalipuram which was quite an ordeal. We managed to find seats, but not in the same place and we were all smashed next to sweaty smelly men playing the equivalent of arm rest fighting with our knees. The Golden Sun resort is about 10 kilometers before the city and normally if we were anywhere else in the world we would have probably just waited till we got to the city and then taken a cab to where we needed to go. Not in India - rules don't seem to exist and we're definitely getting the hang of it. As we approached the giant sign for Golden Sun, the four of us stood up and ran toward the front of the bus yelling STOP!!! The driver calmly slowed down and we jumped off before it came to a halt. Laughing hysterically at the absurdity, we ran toward the resort just as the sun was setting. We got our rooms, put our stuff down, got into our bathing suits and jumped in the pool. We had a great north Indian dinner, drank a couple Kingfishers, alternated between the ocean and the pool, and happily came to a compromise with the seemingly 75 year old "lifeguard" on duty who made sure we could swim before retiring for the night. Totally prune-skinned and exhausted, we went to bed late, fully planning to wake up early enough to see the sunrise.. Of course that didn't happen. Instead, we woke up at around 10 ish, ate breakfast, nursed our hangovers and took one last dip in the pool before we had to check out. Robert and Shasta ended up staying at the resort for another night, but Monica and I took a cab into Mahabalipuram so she could see the temples and caves. A couple hours later we took the bus to Pondycherry which took about an hour and a half and were met by Pushkar (who used to work for KM but left about a month ago). We were just planning on wandering around Pondy until we found a place to stay, but Pushkar had graciously booked us a room in the Sri Aurobindo ashram next to the promenade. To stay at the ashram for one night, it was only 100 rupees. 100 rupees! Even though I am suspicious about the source of the various bug bites I got that night and the possibility of head lice.................... 100 rupees! We dropped off our bags, and then went to this wonderful French restaurant called Le club near the sea. The ashram was situated in the French part of the city - cobblestone streets, colorful shops, smart cars. We really could have been in Europe. The restaurant was beautifully lit with lights strung around all of the trees and hanging from the thatched straw ceiling. I started with a cream-based seafood soup then moved on to steak with mushrooms and pommes frites. Crazy ey? After dinner we took a walk along the promenade and then headed back to the ashram to make the 10:30 curfew. Despite us being blanket-less, I slept quite well. In the morning we woke up pretty late, went to Fab India, and then had breakfast at a place called Rendezvous where I had eggs, chorizo, ham, grilled tomato, potatoes and black tea. Heaven.

Next on the itinerary was to meet Pushkar in his hometown: Auroville. What a strange city! Founded in the 60's, this socialist community was supposed to be a spiritual experiment in creating the "ideal". I looked it up and found this:
"Auroville belongs to nobody in particular.
Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole.
But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
Auroville will be the place of an unending education,
of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.
Auroville wants to be a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and progressive harmony above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities. The purpose of Auroville is to realise human unity."


There is no religion in Auroville but anyone wanting to practice their own faith is of course allowed to do so. Instead the community has adopted a sort of general spirituality that focuses on the teachings of Sri Aurobindo to attain enlightenment. Because of these views, and because the city was founded in the 60's, you can imagine how many hippies migrated from all over the world to participate in communal living. The four main languages of Auroville are English, French, Hindi and Tamil and even though I was there only briefly, I managed to hear all four of them in addition to Russian, Italian, and Spanish. We learned that the soil of 143 different countries was brought to the city and the layout is a circular design around a central banyan tree where they built the Matrimandir. Pushkar took us on his motorbike to the Matrimandir and it is just breathtaking to look at. Not only that, because he is a member of the community, we actually got to go INSIDE which visitors are not allowed to do. The inside of it is just another world altogether. It feels like you're in a spaceship. As soon as you walk in, you have to sit down and put on socks which are provided for you. Then you walk up this HUGE spiral slope that twists a couple times up to the very top where there is a an ominous looking heavy door. We opened it cautiously and stepped inside to a room ten times as large as I thought it would be with soft white carpet, white walls, giant white pillars that seemed to disappear into the ceiling, and white towels purposefully laid out in a circular pattern. In the center lay a massive crystal ball held up by four gold triangles. We chose our towels, sat cross-legged and meditated for ten minutes and left. Despite its futuristic and deliberate design, the energy inside was surprisingly neutral. We left the Matrimandir and had a nice lunch of tofu lasagna and quiche at the visitor's center, and then headed back to Chennai. I slept the whole time on the bus.

The next morning I was summoned to Rahman's studio at 7 am and recorded yet another demo for the same "eastern European short film" that I recorded for before. But this time I pried a little bit more and found out that this demo that I've nonchalantly been recording for the past 2 weeks is actually for a short film by Shekhar Kapoor (Elizabeth, The Four Feathers)! And after about 11 hours of recording and revising and re-recording, Rahman sent the demo to Shekhar and he accepted it. Woohoo! Monica came to the recording session and hopefully she wasn't too bored. She left at around 4 pm. I had a really great time with her.

Unfortunately I can't get the recording until the film comes out, but perhaps I can somehow weasel my way into getting the demos that were rejected. We'll see.

What a weekend!