A universal town

Pondy doesn’t have too much on offer when it comes to sight seeing. There are only 2 beaches, one of which is rocky and hence inaccessible. The other attractions around the place are Aurobindo Ashram, Botanical Garden, Pondicherry Museum, a township known as Auroville, which houses Matri Mandir, a boating center cum park known as Chunnambar Resort. Because it was mentioned as the main attraction in travel guides, we visited Aurobindo Ashram on Friday morning itself. Suffice to say we emerged in record time, after covering all those photographs and artifacts of Aurobindo and ‘The Mother’. It was on our way out from the Ashram that Jins asked the million dollar question “Actually, who is this Aurobindo?” All of us were ‘blissfully’ ignorant.

Auroville is envisioned as a universal town, where people from different nationalities, faiths and beliefs, can live in peace and harmony. The construction of this 'universal town' was started in 1968 under the guidance of ‘The Mother’, a Paris born painter-musician who become sri Aurobindo's disciple and close companion from 1924 till his death in 1950. The development of this Utopia is still in progress. Several countries have offered to set up permanent pavilions, reflecting the culture and ethos of their countries. The Matri Mandir is the spiritual center of Auroville. It is a domed structure, which has a crystal sphere in the meditation room. An open air Amphitheatre in front of the Matri Mandir has a lotus stem like structure built at the center of it, which contains soil from 126 countries, the representatives of which attended the inauguration of the Matri Mandir way back in 1968. posted by Geo Pala, Kerala, India Wednesday, February 01, 2006 at 5:48 PM