Evolution Laboratory

Indian Utopia: Between the traditional villages of south India, with their thatched roofs and wood- canopied verandas, if you venture off the beaten track, you can stumble upon a strange township of futuristic buildings. It looks like the set of a 1960s science-fiction film. There are circular houses with roofs at bizarre angles, walls that slope outwards towards the ground, and slits for windows, like an artist's impression of a moonbase. There are square metallic houses held up on stilts over a smaller concrete lower storey. And it all centres around a giant golden metallic sphere, with dimples all over, rather like a huge golden golf ball. This is called the Matrimandir, or the Mother Temple. A sign on one of the roads points to the "Evolution Laboratory".

The neighbourhoods here have English names, including Aspiration, Certitude, Discipline and Grace. A public drinking fountain advertises "Dynamised water", and a poster beside it explains that "dynamisation" is the incorporation of energies in water that make it healthier, and that one way of achieving this is to make the water "listen" to Bach and Mozart. Rural India, where cows and chickens wander through the villages, and life often gives the impression it has changed little in centuries, is the last place you would expect to find all this. But this is not a film set or a theme park. Here, truth is stranger than fiction. This is Auroville, a living, working community of 1,800 people from 38 countries, who have given up their lives at home to come and live in what is a real-life Utopian project. posted by GoodLookiN! Thursday, August 25, 2005@ 3:21 PM 2 comments