Love against hatred, knowledge against ignorance

South India might as well be a separate country, it looks like a picture in an island-getaway brochure. North India, by way of contrast, looks like a picture that nobody trying to sell you anything would ever put in any brochure. From Calcutta I landed in Pondicherry, an old french colony with a definate French-Catholic flair. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is popular here.

Adding to the mix, Pondicherry is also the spiritual home of Sri Aurobindo, a mystical Indian poet. I found a book of his poetry in the local bookstore and it was all pretty abstruse and elliptical; admittedly more appealing than the "God is Peace, Rama Dhamma Ding Dong" I was expecting. Sri Aurobindo had his visions but the Aurobindo Ashram, as well as a village outside of town called Auroville, was set up by his partner, a French lady named "the Mother" (lowercase tee, capital em) who by the extant photographic evidence looked decrepit and terrifying. The exact nature of the relationship between these two still eludes me.

There is something sinister about the whole Aurobindo operation, but I can't pin it down. Last night I went to an Aurobindo-sponsored dance-drama performance. This involved getting a special Aurobindo stamp from my hotel (because apparently my hotel, along with half of Pondicherry, is in on this whole scheme as well) and then going to the place marked "playground" on my special Aurobindo map, which was not actually a playground at all but an unmarked building in the center of town. There are a lot of unmarked buildings in town, and I get the feeling the Ashram owns most of them.

The dance-drama depicted the struggle of good against evil, love against hatred, knowledge against ignorance. To be honest, there wasn't a lot of drama, nor a lot of what I would call dance. But there was plenty of intensity and abstruse voice-overs. The good guys won in the end. I was satisfied.Posted by Steve Hackbarth on 12/2/04; 5:59:30 PM from the dept.