Happiness is a Place

A few months ago I went into a bookshop to pick up a guide to Nepal, which they didn’t have, and walked out with one to Bhutan instead. I didn’t know much about Bhutan, but I quickly realised I would be going. 

Bhutan decided long ago that we will never be a military power, we will never be an economic force, so to survive we must have a distinct identity. This is the identity you see; our clothes, language, the architecture. You look around and feel you are in a different world. This is not an accident. 

As if to prove it, the government has created its own criteria for measuring what it terms Gross National Happiness. It has spurned the pursuit of economic growth and favours preserving the fabric of society and the wellbeing of its citizens instead.

Then I read a bit more, and discovered that as part of their unorthodox approach to pretty much everything, they have a policy of "low impact, high value" tourism. This means a minimum charge for foreign tourists, which includes a guide, food, transport and accommodation. In peak season, travelling alone, the figure is 290 US Dollars. Per day. Should keep out the riff-raff....

Bhutan Immigration Form

It's an hour's flight from Calcutta and the last ten minutes are spectacular, as we bank our way left and right through the mountain passes on our descent into Paro, and I catch a first glimpse of white Himalayan peaks in the distance. Walking to the terminal building, I think this place is going to be very, very different.

Paro Airport

Waiting for me the other side of the friendly customs guys is Uygen Penjore, who is going to be my guide for the week. He is impeccably turned out in a black Gho, the traditional Bhutanese male attire. (Everyone is wearing one of these.) He offers me a white scarf by way of a welcome and we walk to the car and meet Chencho, my driver for the week. He doesn’t speak much English, but has a talkative face.

Chencho and Ugyen

We drive straight from Paro to Thimpu, the capital, through stunning valleys; the rugged, forested hillsides, dotted with traditional wooden houses, rising up from fast flowing rivers of the cleanest water I have seen for years. The air is crisp and clear, and I feel truly transported.

My hotel in Thimpu is right in the middle of town, and from my corner room, I look directly out on to Bhutan's very own Piccadilly Circus; the busiest road junction in the busiest city. The Bhutanese don't do traffic lights, so it is managed like this instead:

Piccadilly Circus, Thimpu

Uygen, who is from Paro, confessed to me that he doesn’t like Thimpu, because it is too noisy and crowded. 

I told him that never, under any circumstances, should he ever go to India.

Calcutta

To most people, the word Calcutta invokes the miserable Black Hole, a military prison cell in which an unknown number of Europeans perished, or the image of a saintly, geriatric Mother Teresa picking her way through the desperate slums.

Kolikata was a riverside fishing village before 1690, when the East India Company built a fort there. It flourished, and Calcutta became the capital of British India until 1911. You can't colonise or control a foreign land without the collaboration of local people, and the British were masters at eliciting it. They took control of Bengal by exploiting the treachery of Mir Jafar, a lieutenant of the Nawab, and having gained power, kept it by appointing co-operative locals. Their influence is everywhere, from the fine heritage buildings dotted around the centre of the city, to the vast expanse of green, the Maidan, in its midst.

Victoria Memorial, Calcutta

In Calcutta, unlike most places I have visited in India, I carried on the British tradition, and enlisted some local help. Saurav, or Sol, Chatterjee, a gentleman of the finest substance and character, has shown me how to live the high life here. I can’t bring myself to call it Kolkata, because this is still, defiantly, Calcutta.

Sol and I. Legend! (That's me on the right...)

The long trousers and polo shirt got a rare airing as we toured from club to club. Beginning with a few (dozen) drinks at the Calcutta Cricket and Football Club, founded in 1792 and the second oldest cricket ground in the world after Lords. We played tennis on the grass courts of Calcutta South Club, once considered the finest outside of SW19 and known as the Wimbledon of the East. (I graced them not with the panache of Federer so much as the petulance of McEnroe.) We sipped Bloody Marys throughout an extended lunch at the Royal Calcutta Golf Club’s pavilion at the Maidan, in front of the only bowling green in town, naturally. I have enjoyed the friendship and hospitality of a truly wonderful group of people.

Sol has put me up in a guest room at the Saturday Club, an old colonial haunt in the centre of town that has a badminton court in the middle of its main room and a fine verandah that must have seen a gin and tonic or two dispatched in its time. I added a couple more to the tally. It is pure Graham Greene.

Realising that I’d spent my entire time either playing tennis, eating, drinking or sleeping off hangovers, I dragged myself off around town on a heritage walk entitled Confluence of Cultures. We met next to a burned out car, and proceeded to wander among the “Grey” part of town, between Central, the “White” town of the Sahibs, and the “Black” town of the Babus.

The real story of Calcutta lies within these few blocks, where religions and cultures from all over the world jostle around the grotty bazaars. On our short stroll we pass churches of every Christian denomination, a Buddhist temple, Zoroastrian fire temple (where the guy invites us in to show us some ferocious looking fish he is keeping down a well), a Chinese temple full of men playing chess and reading the paper and a Synagogue (there are only twenty four Jews left living in Calcutta, and three synagogues) that looks like a cathedral. In between them we wander through fairly impoverished backstreets complete with the occasional slum and plenty of street dwellers.

Magen David Synagogue, Calcutta

Calcutta was at the heart of the Bengali Renaissance in the 18th and 19th centuries; a movement to reform and modernise Indian culture, incorporating positive elements of Western ways. The movement itself was a confluence of East and West, and Bengalis still pride themselves on their strong literary, artistic and scientific culture. If the club scene, tennis courts and so forth speak of a desire to emulate London high society, then here is the real emulation – a bustling, multicultural, intellectual, pioneering and dynamic city, complete with inevitable poverty and attendant squalor.

Calcutta seems somehow less chaotic than other parts of India. I found myself walking along (in) the road the other day, before realising that everyone else was on the pavement. Then I was chastised by some guy in a uniform for ducking under a rope to cross a busy junction. This is India, for fuck’s sake, I thought to myself. But it's not really - it's Bengal. And it's Calcutta.

It's not completely lacking in chaos of course, rather it has its own peculiar brand. At 1pm they reverse the direction of traffic on most of the main streets, completely disorientating me. And the ride to the airport this morning felt like a computer game, Calcutta Taxi Airport Death Race, perhaps. Through some of the poorest parts of town in an unresponsive old Ambassador, it was just another verse in a repetitive, but never boring, folk song about heart stopping Indian taxi journeys. (Called Never put your luggage in the boot of a Calcutta taxi).

Last night was my last in India. Just before I went to bed, fairly pissed, I rang British Airways and enquired about delaying my flight home. In deliberating over whether or not to do this, and knowing that they shut at 8pm GMT, I asked the girl on the other end of the phone what time it was now. "Hold on sir," she said, in a suddenly all too famiiar accent, "I will just check for you." 

"Where are you?" I asked, already knowing the answer, and smiling to myself as the decision made itself. I’m not finished yet, I thought. 

But of course I am. Dictionary.com's word of the day this morning, flashing up on the iPhone as I sat waiting to board my plane, was knackered. I shot myself a knowing glance.

A little fresh air is bound to do me the world of good.

Heart of Darkness / Death in Varanasi

*

I felt drawn to India to confront the things that make me uncomfortable or afraid. And the two things I am afraid of most, I think, are shit and death. So I made a trip to Varanasi the embodiment of my quest - its dark, mysterious, impenetrable heart.

I had read that Varanasi was a festering shithole, drowning in its own squalor, where I would be hassled, polluted and poisoned out of mind and body. A bastion of savagery where people bathe in the fetid river as half cremated corpses float by, where fervent insanity and archaic religious conviction has triumphed over reason.

And it is. 

Everything you might hate about India is magnified here. Magnified to the power of, well, India. Varanasi is India squared.

And I love it. 

Because despite being the filthiest place I have ever been, and riddled with absurd paradoxes, it is captivating, enchanting and irresistible. It surprised me not with how squalid it is, which I had expected, but how colourful and joyful. I imagined it to feel oppressively dark and sober but instead it is a lesson in how to absorb unmentionable things into the fabric of existence.

Varanasi, the spiritual heart of the Hindu universe, has stood on this crescent shaped stretch of the mighty Ganges for anything up to 5,000 years, among the oldest cities on Earth. For Hindus, the Ganges is the embodiment of all sacred waters, and is spiritually purifying (irrespective of its physical condition, which appears to be the complete opposite). Bathing in it, or having one's ashes scattered in it, cleanses the soul.

The Ganges is wide and sweeping here, and on the opposite bank to the city is a great expanse of sand before you reach the tree line and the villages behind. On the western side, the ghats, rows of steps, lead down to the water from the town itself. They run for five kilometres, the edge of the city, its focus and its soul. They are lined with magnificent, if decrepit, palaces that, in my architectural ignorance, I shall describe as Venetian. The contrast in the two banks of the river creates the illusion of a shorefront, and reinforces the spiritual sense that Varanasi marks the boundary of something; a cusp or outer limit.

Take a boat ride, or walk along the ghats at sunrise and every facet of human life is played out effortlessly before you, with unwavering reverence and persistent joy. The water may be brimming with refuse, dead bodies and effluent, but these things are invisible if you believe it to be pure and holy. And so they are bathing and washing themselves at the water’s edge, perfoming puja, worshipping the river and throwing up their arms to the rising sun. They are urinating, defecating perhaps. Washing clothes and the corpses of dead relatives as cows cool down and lap the water in between them.

Immediately behind the ghats extends a medieval labyrinth of passages so tight, winding and congested that navigating your way among them is impossible. Through their tapered walkways comes a never-ending carnival; a procession of cows, dogs, sheep, goats, bicycles, carts, motorbikes, tourists, backpackers, hippies, Indians and Sadhus (holy men in saffron robes with elaborate facial hair and wrinkled faces), all going about their daily business. The litter strewn streets are stained with coloured dye (from Holi) and puddles of assorted excrement. The Lonely Planet warns of the “Varanasi Shakedown” but the biggest danger is posed by a swishing cow’s tail, sodden with fresh diarrhea, as you try not to get run over by a motorbike or step on someone’s dreadlocks.

Up on the little terrace at my guesthouse or walking along the ghats, I could spend hours, days, weeks, just watching the peculiar rituals of daily life casually unfold around me. Men huddle around a chessboard, a dog sleeps on the stained ground. In front of them an endless game of cricket is played using scraps of wood for bats. A wedding is going on somewhere, the drumming rising up out of the alleyways. On the rooftops either side of mine, children are locked in concentration, their arms and bodies quick and strong as they fly their fighting kites out over the river. Monkeys patrol the parapets, scavenging for food and water, stopping only to groom or copulate.

The touts are no more persistent or irritating than anywhere else in the world. The shit is an inconvenience, but you watch out for it. The town is hectic to say the least, and the passageways an impenetrable maze of unpassable traffic, but so what? The people are wonderful, always offering a smile, a hello or a namaste. A few of the main ghats get a bit crowded, but elsewhere they are peaceful and quite beautiful. Even the river looks clean (cleaner than the Thames) from a distance, though it doesn't survive much closer scrutiny than that.

If Varanasi were my heart of darkness, a place of savagery and insanity that I felt drawn dangerously towards, then being here has turned the pilgrimage on its head. It has taught me, quite genuinely and emphatically, as someone once said, that the only thing one really has to fear, is fear itself.

*  

I have never felt that far away from Death in India. From the Tower of Silence in Mumbai to the dead dog in Goa; the shrouded crashed car in Hampi, the crumpled petrol tanker outside Chennai. This didn’t trouble me though and I was never looking over my shoulder, because I already knew where I’d find Death.

I knew Death would be in Varanasi, because people come here from all over India to die. Hindus believe that if you are cremated here on the banks of the Ganges you achieve Moksha - the cycle of reincarnation is broken and your soul ascends to heaven.

On my way to Varanasi, it occurred to me that the people I would watch being cremated tomorrow, were still alive. I didn’t know them in life, but in death they would have meaning for me. I would watch them on their final journey, carried through the streets on bamboo stretchers towards the ghats to be washed in the holy river one last time. I would be a voyeur, a spectator, while the wood was weighed on sinister looking scales and stacked carefully in place. I would turn my head from the smoke as the family peeled away the cheap wrapping from the shrouded body and lifted it carefully on to the pyre.

I had imagined how this would pan out. It would be sunset, my mind and soul steeled for their first glimpse of a human corpse. But this is Varanasi, and nothing ever happens quite as you expect. So it was walking along a busy thoroughfare, dodging cows, cycle rickshaws and cars, that I saw my first body, the male relatives striding purposefully, chanting Rama Nama Satya Hai (The Name of Rama is Truth). No tears in their eyes, just a look of steely resoluteness and purpose.

I then got hopelessly lost in the alleyways north of town, and was relieved to eventually find myself back on the river. Disorientated, the acrid smell of smoke hit me at the same time I glimpsed the wood stacks. Manikarnika Ghat - the burning ghat. As eerie, sinister and macabre sounding, looking place, as you are likely to find.

Corpses lie around awaiting their turn, wrapped in orange and gold. Pyres burn away at various stages of their work. Low caste doms pick their way through the detritus in the hope of finding some coin or piece of jewellery, while others hose down the shimmering embers. A chant then, or a drumbeat, and another body is brought here, past the cows, tourists and touts. Two hundred and fifty a day, if they're busy.

The scene might look and sound hellish, but it manages not to feel it. It remains macabre, how could it not, but it is not especially sombre. It is a functional place, where something necessary and good is being done. Hindus believe that once a person is born, they never die. Death is not an end but a transition, a time for respect, not sadness.

I’m not religious, but in my few days here I have realised how much I admire and respect the devotion and commitment of the Indian people, not just to their beliefs but to the patterns and realities of their life in general. It is humbling and endearing. And it reminds me that we can fear death so much, and not just death, but failure, judgment, darkness, that we forget to live at all.

I'm here for three days but I want to stay longer. I want to understand more of Varanasi and its cultish ways, but I know it would assimilate me if I stayed too long. Prolonged exposure would subtly, progressively exorcise my sanity and reason. No doubt in time I would eventually succumb to the irresistible lure of the Ganges and dip a toe in the water one time perhaps. A toe, then a foot. Then a hand, a leg. Just a quick dip maybe....

From that point on I would hasten towards an untimely death. One day my corpse would be tethered to a bamboo litter and carried through the narrow streets for its final baptism in the mighty Ganga, filthy yet pure. I wonder if, as the fire consumed the flesh and bones, my soul might afford a last glimpse down at the magical city as it rose up from its host, indistinguishable by then from the sandalwood smoke that stung the eyes of the onlookers gathered there, as I once had been, and wispily eloped into the clear, dark night.

Outcomes

*

Chickens

It was early and the traffic was just warming up when I took a “taxi” to Chennai airport. On the way out of Pondicherry a motorcyclist suddenly materialised from behind a parked van and we had to brake hard to avoid hitting him. It happened in a flash, and my gaze met his through the filthy windscreen. I was surprised at what I noticed in his eyes, because it was nothing. No shock, fear, anger or alarm. Nothing.

Coupled with the non-reaction of my driver, Ravi, it made me reflect on a couple of things about India that had been floating idly around in my mind. Firstly, that the outcome is the only thing that matters. If we’d hit the guy, or someone had hit us as we braked, I’m fairly certain the shit would have hit the fan. But we didn’t, and they didn’t, so who cares?

The same outcome bias causes people to persistently lie about what they know or have. What difference does it make if a tuk-tuk driver doesn’t know where your guest house is if someone else does and he can ask them and get you there? The means is unimportant compared with the end. Similarly, when a shop owner tells you he sells something he doesn’t, and sends a kid off to another shop to get it, what’s the big deal? You still get what you want.

I also think there's a wider concept of responsibility lying with society as a whole rather than the individual. Between them, Indians can get you what you need, or where you need to be. The role of each individual in the delivery is irrelevant; they're just parts of the whole. And on the road, society says it is acceptable (compulsory?) to drive aggressively and inconsiderately, so if problems arise out of doing so, it is society’s fault as much as the guy behind the wheel or handlebars.

Ravi must have sensed my silent contemplations, and set about debunking them by driving like a complete arsehole for the next three hours. For the first time in India I detected real anger and annoyance on the part of other drivers as he carved them up and ran them out of his way. Oh well.

After about half an hour we had to slow for some commotion or other. Tens of people milled around blocking the road, where a truck carrying live chickens had jackknifed. It lay unnaturally on its side, and next to it the cages of confused birds had been stacked on top of one another by the onlookers, some of whom were still rounding up a few clucking escapees. It was a bizarre and surreal sight. “Accident,” Ravi solemnly observed. Yes, I thought, most probably caused by some fucking idiot like you.

Outside Chennai we passed the scene of an earlier, and much more serious, “accident” in which a bus and a petrol tanker had met in a head on collision. The front of the tanker had been emphatically crushed and I doubt that the driver survived. I tried not to dwell on the image of the cab's flattened carcass, but it proved impossible to shake off. I decided to spare myself any more carnage by falling asleep, but every time I managed to nod off I was woken almost immediately by another reckless swerve from Ravi or the noisy protestations of his latest victim.

*

Post Office

Before I left Pondicherry, I created a little extra space in my rucksack by sending a parcel home. I carefully packed up a bundle of clothes, books and assorted tat and took it to a small post office in the French Quarter. I was directed to a dimly lit room out the back, where a very old man was hidden among the overflowing heaps of sacks and parcels he had apparently scattered about the place.

He had me write down the to and from addresses on the back of a used envelope, sign an indecipherable (and blank) form where he had indicated, and hand over 3,800 rupees (£40). He arrived at this figure by performing numerous sums that I was unable to follow on the back of another envelope. I then watched him roll both the envelopes, the form and my money into a tight cylinder, fold it in half and twirl an elastic band around it, before casually tossing it in a drawer that happened to be open.

In exchange for my money and possessions, I received another scrap of paper, upon which he had scribbled something completely illegible. 

I'm sure it will arrive in no time, beautifully wrapped in white cotton, the seams stitched tight by his steady hand and sealed with blood red wax.


** The parcel arrived six days later

Pondicherry: Ville Blanche, Ville Noire

I half expected Pondicherry to resemble some lost arrondissement of Paris, grafted onto the skin of Southern India. Wide boulevards lined by bougainvillea clad mansions, the smell of freshly baked baguettes wafting through their open windows, titillating lingerie drying in the breeze and an adulterous husband scuttling down a nearby drainpipe.

The promenade looks vaguely French, though it's not exactly les planches in Deauville. In the evening, by the light of a full moon, children are clambering around the statue of Gandhi and the throngs of people are eating street food from a nearby market, walking hand in hand, or queuing up to have their photograph taken with yours truly.

The map reveals the French influence as a grid of streets emanates from a beautiful park in the centre of the old town. The first few blocks away from the coast constitute the French Quarter or, in a brilliantly casual turn of colonial racism, the Ville Blanche. Blossoming flowers clamber over classical villas, painted mustard, pink and blue. Some of them are in wonderful condition, the rest in varying states of decay.

A few blocks back from the seafront, a canal demarcates the town, the quaint Ville Blanche to its east, the Tamil Quarter, or Ville Noire to the west. In case you were in any doubt as to the transition this might presage, the “canal” emits the putrid stench of standing water, combined with whatever else happens to be floating around in it. One road is somewhat romantically called, “Rue du petit canal,” but there can’t be a street anywhere in the world whose name conjures up an image so distant from its reality. The other side is real India: chaotic, noisy, dirty, disorientating and irresistible.

You might not be able to smell the patisserie over all of this, but you can taste it. Down on the waterfront I ate the kind of croissant one usually finds in British service stations in the middle of the night. The only thing French about Le Café, aside from the name, was the staggering indifference of the waiter to my presence. When I deliberated for a nanosecond during my order, he disappeared for ten minutes.

Things improved dramatically elsewhere though. The decidedly un-French sounding Baker Street is a slick looking place, on the Indian side of the canal, and their croissants, pain au chocolate and pain aux raisins are of the highest quality. The coffee is pretty decent too, though not as good as the espresso in Auroville, which had imbued me with a renewed optimism about the possible quality of European food and drink as I strode confidently out for dinner.

A long time coming

I learnt a few things that night. I learnt not to eat beef in India, for culinary reasons, not cultural ones. I learnt that the guys in Villa Shanti can’t make a proper martini, and that you should never, ever, be tempted to try the wine. They only actually had two of the wines from their impressive looking list, and the first of them tasted like something you would expect to find bubbling around the outside of stainless steel vats in a Bond villain’s secret laboratory. Sensing where this was going, I suggested just a sample of the alternative. Sample was the operative word here - the faintest twinge of urea mixed with rancid sherry that’s been in your grandmother’s drinks cabinet since the end of the war. A thimbleful is too much for anyone, and I gestured for another Heineken.

The following morning I went out early to run it off. I headed inland and before long had crossed another “canal,” far more pungent than the first, that heralded yet another transition: a stride further into the darker side of town. The road was lined with people sleeping, early morning market stalls, and piles of rubbish. I turned south, over the railway line and, no idea where I was going, snaked my way through some decidedly Indian backstreets; attracting puzzled looks and friendly hellos from the people as they spat toothpaste, phlegm or blood into the gutter from the thresholds of their tiny homes. Poverty prickled my sweaty skin.

Eventually I made it to the promenade, where the people were neatly turned out for their morning stroll. Women in beautiful saris “jogged,” portly men in trainers walked briskly or stretched leisurely. My run had taken me through two Indias, it seemed; one in darkness, one in light. One subsisting, the other aspiring.

I ran the length of the promenade several times. I watched people who had slept on the beach emerging from the cocoons of their dirty blankets, mangy dogs walking nonchalantly among them, as I picked my way through the strolling masses. One India then, not two. And not split by canals, or street names, or divided into black and white. Rather one sprawling, swirling galaxy of people, all on different trajectories, propelled by different beliefs, motivations and desires. Some of them you see, some of them you don't.

When I looked out to sea I saw a strange cluster of sticks puncturing the surface of the water where some platform or other must once have stood. I thought of WG Sebald's The Rings of Saturn and remembered how transient all of this is anyway. 

When I got back to the homestay I jumped in an ice cold shower, because after all that running, the sweat was pouring from me, and I was fucking hot.

The Search for Auroville

According to the map, ten kilometres or so north of Pondicherry is a place called Auroville.

Maybe it was just me, but it was impossible to find. The turning from the main road wasn't marked and as I got further inland, the signs were either hidden behind trees or the letters on them had been scorched away by the blistering sun. Even when I was on it, I mistook the red dirt road I needed to take for something else, expecting an actual road instead. Truth be told, I didn’t know what I was looking for, nor what I might find.

Which is not surprising, because Auroville is not so much a place as it is a dream:

There should be somewhere on Earth, a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of good will who have a sincere aspiration, could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme truth; a place of peace, concord and harmony

Such was the vision of Mirra Alfassa, a Frenchwoman who worked with Sri Aurobindo, nationalist turned philosopher and guru, at his ashram in Pondicherry. He identified her with the concept of the Divine Mother, and believed the two of them shared one consciousness. The Mother, as she became known, assumed full control of the ashram when he retired from public life in 1926.

Sri Aurobindo Ghose

The Mother conceived a “universal township” that would accelerate “the progress of humanity towards its splendid future.” The town would be Auroville – the city of the dawn. Endorsed by the Indian Government and UNESCO, which invited member states to participate in its development, it was triumphantly inaugurated on 28th February 1968. Architect Roger Anger (a Frenchman, so probably not as funny a name as if he were English), under the direction of the Mother, envisaged the city as a whirling galaxy, at the centre of which would stand the Matrimandir, or “Mother’s shrine.”

Model of the city of Auroville (proposed)

The Mother was still alive when the foundation stone of this mysterious monument was laid in February 1971.

The Matrimandir will be the soul of Auroville, and the sooner it is there the better it will be for everybody

Now I know nothing happens quickly in India, but when she said this, she probably didn't think it would take thirty-seven years to finish. Needless to say, the rest of it is, to put it kindly, still in the pre-construction phase.

When I saw the Matrimandir, in splendid isolation, it reminded me of a golf course I saw in Goa. Thousands of gallons of water soaked up by the lush grass, hundreds of man hours nurturing and tending it, and not a single golfer within a hundred miles. Build it and they will come – but it was built, and they didn’t. In a place that refutes religion, they built a cathedral, I thought. Then I changed my mind: a folly. (Later I remembered that la folie is French for madness. Touché.)

What the FUCK is that?

The top half of the Matrimandir is a chamber of white marble, at the centre of which sits the largest optically perfect crystal in the world. Sunlight is electronically diverted onto it in a single beam from an aperture at the apex of the sphere. It is a place for concentration aimed at finding one's own consciousness. It's not easy to gain access, but my friends Trez and Anthony are staying in Auroville and went inside the other day. Trez described it thus, "Was very cool architecturally, spiritually kind of zero....the silence was lovely." So that's what it takes to get a bit of peace and quiet in India...

The dream and reality of Auroville are a long way apart, and time is not narrowing the gap. Forty-seven years later then, the city of 50,000 Aurovilians is actually just 2,300 people scattered about the forest they planted. A thousand are Indian and the rest contain more French, Germans and Italians than all the other nations combined. Well over half the population are the wrong side of 40, and too many kids leave by their twenties, .

The vision seems replete with contradictions. Anyone, for example, can become an Aurovilian. But elsewhere in the literature it says one must “have some financial means of one’s own, at least sufficient to see one through the first few years in the township”. Assuming you do have enough cash, the process of acceptance is long and complicated, and you wonder if they are being too stringent to foster a community diverse enough to prosper. And the principle of collective decision-making, wonderful in theory, is debilitating in practice.

Wanting to be convinced, I took this map from the visitor centre and rode around to try and get a feel for it all. It’s impossible to know which places actually exist and which are just names on a map – Silence, Solitude, Bliss, Courage, Luminosity, Gratitude. There’s even a place called Miracle, which seemed ironic given that’s what they need.

Auroville is nothing if not enigmatic, but the map didn’t help me solve its riddle. Neither did the visitor centre nor the old movies they make you watch, nor everything I’ve read since about Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and the Divine Consciousness. I love the notion of a place where people of all creeds, colours and nationalities can work and be together, united and not divided, with no money, no discord, striving for the spiritual and conscious evolution of the human race. But it is just a notion, and Auroville proves it.

Which is why, after half a century, middle aged Europeans are still sitting around, sagely discussing plans for their utopia. A utopia whose soul is a giant golf ball encased in fifty six kilograms of solid gold, in the middle of a city that hasn’t been, and never will be, built. The futility of their continued endeavour is the only thing I grasped about this curious place with any real Certitude.

That’s on the map too. If you find yourself in Reality, you’ve gone right past it.