Here-dom

Why am I here? I keep asking myself that and can’t find a legitimate answer which satisfies my hunger and need. My first half-ass joking answer is that I needed a vacation from the stress which comes with the freedom of a first-world country, but there isn’t even a glimpse of humor in that. People back home are asking what I’m doing, what I’m learning, and then people here ask how are our experiences affecting us as human beings united and as individuals. I can’t even fully answer the first question about what I’m doing here much less begin to start on the other questions on how it is affecting me. When I first signed up for this study abroad trip, I thought I would be working five or six days a week in an Indian classroom learning about the differences between the schooling here compared to the schooling back home. Instead, I have been thrown in charge of a classroom twice a week therefore planning curriculum twice a week and then embarking on exploration seminars where we learn about the way the community functions environmentally, socially, economically, etc. along with seminars about the local Tamil villages. I spend a lot of time in the local city of Pondi because I love to see the local Tamils interacting naturally as well as spending a lot of time in my room, the Solar Café, or on the American Pavilion porch reading and writing, two of my all-time enjoyments. I find it odd at times that I am reading all these books about India while being in India, although Auroville is so not India that that frustrates me then. And then I ask myself all over again, “Why am I here?” It’s a circle.
I know I am here for purely selfish reasons. I have come to terms with that. I’m not going to have some life-altering influence on a child’s life here nor did I anticipate I would. I came to see another culture and begin to look at life from a non-Westernized perspective, and that I am beginning to do. I don’t think it will ever be possible for me to do that fully unless I lived in a non-Western culture permanently, and even then it would take the entirety of my life to learn how. I am seeing how the poor, rural south Indians live and I am seeing how Westernized hippies looking for something (self-acceptance? the divine within them? purity? commonalities? a self-sustaining community? freedom?) are living in an intentional community in Tamil Nadu, India. This must value something…
I really don’t want to sound like Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love. She was (is) constantly searching for something (in an obnoxious fashion) and that continuous searching reminds me of the three brothers in The Darjeeling Limited: You won’t necessarily find the inner peaceful balance within you if you’re running around searching for it. “Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death,” Gilbert writes in Eat, Pray, Love. I think it comes naturally as you allow yourself to grow. I don’t know since I’m nowhere near that, but my roommate Julia tells me that maybe I didn’t come here for the purely educational aspect of this experience as is the topic of this study abroad trip. We are all gaining different things by being here.
Looking around, I am on a granite natural bench under a large, shady tree with stacks of litter and cow dung around me. I am about a ten minute walk from my temporary home here in the beautiful, serene Tibetan Pavilion and in between a Tamil village and Auroville. A thin, tiny woman is walking by with a pile of branches on her head, balanced with one lean arm draped over it. A few cows graze on the litter scattered over the red Earth as birds sit lazily on their backs. A motorbike with two Tamil boys rumbles by, honking as they pass the woman. Life here is so different from anywhere in the Western world and I love that. It makes me wonder why’s and how’s, promoting more curiosity about how the world functions as a whole. There are no rights and wrongs, no lefts and rights, no fronts and backs. It’s all a matter of perception.
“India is a drug in itself. Time there is circular, or perhaps elliptical, and the very air, the meandering sacred cows and the roadside chai-stands hardly stimulate decisive action. It is a country that invites meditative visiting, and one whose soul takes time to absorb.” ~Fodor’s Exploring India