The STD Booth in Kuilapalayam
It was long long ago… but long after the dinosaurs, long after the Bronze Age.
To be more precise, it was when the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Reason were coming to end.
The New World was still an open secret that even when seen or heard, no one understood.
It was in 1995 to be exact, on May 10th.
Well, you may think that I am exaggerating, but 1995 feels like long long ago, especially when the world is transforming at an exponential rate.
Some dates get etched in your memory and of course, you can always find a good reason for it. Anyway, with or without reason some dates do stay with you and in my case, this was one such. Perhaps it is because that was the day when I reached the portal to a New World after searching for it for nearly ten years.
No, Google was not yet there on earth. Shannon’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication had already set in motion Information Theory. Mandelbrot, having studied the problem of noise in telephone communications, had gifted the world with the art and math of Fractal Geometry and its mesmerizing images. Sir Tim Berners-Lee had rolled out the World Wide Web on the Internet with the telephone directory of CERN as its pilot and the WWW was still at the deceptive stage of its exponential growth.
In fact, I was running away from technology, I was terrified by the monstrosity of the Industrial Revolution, from its mass production and mass hypnosis on one side and the growing ecological breakdown on the other.
I found myself to be a misfit to be a cog in the wheel.
India had just opened up her doors for globalisation and I was a professionally trained Product Designer from India’s premier design institution the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. But I was desperate for a new direction in life and had quit my profession. I knew the direction India was taking but I was looking for a new shore without even knowing how to find it.
But then, there was an inner compass to browse the Innernet.
I was not interested in designing products, I knew I must redesign myself and I wanted a lab where this can be done.
And I found that lab on the shores of the Coromandel Coast of Tamil Nadu.
By then 99% of the Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest cover of the Coromandel Coast was already gone and the last 1% was in some sacred groves scattered along the shores. There was a bunch of people recreating a forest from the remnants of the sacred groves.
In fact, they were there because of an old French woman whom they called The Mother. Her original name was Mirra Alfassa, daughter of an Egyptian Jewish mother and Turkish Jewish father who had migrated to France. She was destined to become the beloved Mother of Sri Aurobindo ashram in India.
At the age of 90, she initiated the creation of a new city, in fact, a spaceship to a New World, the world of the sun on earth.
No, it was a whole new galaxy in the making.
It was not the first time on earth such an attempt was made.
Akhenaten, the eighteenth-dynasty Pharaoh of Egypt, son of Tiye, had tried to build a city as a gateway to the sun during the end of the Bronze Age.
It was called Amarna, City of the Horizon, a city where Akhenaten and the beautiful one, Nefertiti, were making a radical revolution to find their path to the sun way beyond the physical dimension.
While in India, the Rishis were chanting the Gayatri mantra of Viswamitra adoring Savitri, the daughter of the sun, to find their way to the Sunworld.
After thousands of years, the old dream has come back, a new attempt is being made and the Mother called it Auroville, the City of Dawn, a portal to a new dimension of consciousness.
Sri Aurobindo, whom Lord Minto of the British Raj called the most dangerous man of India, had already left his body. But before leaving he gave us a new Gayatri mantra and composed Savitri, a mantric portal to a new dimension on earth.
All this, still largely unknown to the world, was well woven into that city in the making.
She said it was the city the earth needed.
The mystery of Auroville was calling me like a powerful magnet.
On that day morning, I reached Pondicherry town on the shores of the Bay of Bengal. Then I bought a bicycle from the Janata Stores on Jawaharlal Nehru Street and cycled my way to Auroville.
I was going home.
I knew no one there and yet it felt like going home.
After reaching there, within a month someone gave me a house to live, a lovely hut in a forest. There was no water, no electricity, no bathroom or toilet, and it was called Bliss.
Around my hut was a forest.
And I felt absolutely at home.
It was perfect.
A silent place, without any trace of excitement.
The nearest telephone booth, STD Booth as it was called then, was 6 km away in a quiet village called Kuilapalayam.
There were no cell phones at that time and no one could reach me.
I was alone and felt completely safe and at home.
I had no intention to use that telephone booth.
I hardly had any money either, I felt no need to call anyone.
It reminded me of the old world.
I was looking for new connectivity, a connection with myself.
I wanted to talk to myself and the telephone booth in Kuilapalayam was of no use.
The portal to the New World was somewhere in the depths of my own heart.
Auroville was inside me.
In fact, the journey had just begun.
