This is an international community founded 30 years ago by six American and Canadian hippies following the vision of Sri Aurobindo Ashram’s driving force’s (a French woman known as “The Mother) dream of an international community founded on the principle of spiritual growth regardless of nationality or economic level.

Now it is a community of 1,650 people with a Chicago North Shore feel without the financial competition. It is rich and sophisticated way beyond its numbers precisely due to the people it attracts – mostly not “dropouts,” the inhabitants are people who have outgrown the shortcomings of the spontanious world outside, seek to live out their dreams and take refuge in this haven.

My first day here was spent hitching rides around the ten square kilometer area of Auroville on the backs of motorbikes. The place is really made up of tiny five to fifty people communities randomly dotted over the landscape mostly invisible from one another or from the few narrow roads. At the center of all this sits a perfect mediation room of white marble with a crystal sphere at its center, the whole room suspended in upper third monumental globe covered in goldleaf disks, breaking symbolically from the red, sandy earth.

People work voluntarily on what interests them, the place is evolved enough to have industries and organizations touching many fields – there is no competition for jobs or salaries so you set the pace. There is nothing to be won but results. The place is all about progressive environmental and agro work also – everything is wind and solar driven.. The only major unsolved problem is what to do with the plastic – seems they havn’t got a fleece factory yet.

Most young people here either seem to be multilingual homegrowns or grad student specialists transplants. Nor are the people in way homogenious – the only thing they seem to share is a disdain for public displays of emotion or uptightness – the place reminds me a bit of the liberal Evanston that once was in my childhood – the land of Dugos, Mulvanys and Lermans – before the dollars gave the idealism a kick out the door to cheaper environs.

To me Evanston’s idealism centered on increasing “racial equality” against a backdrop of African-American disposession. Similarly, Auroville is a developed nation standard intellectual island afloat in a sea of struggling Tamil Villages. In the case of Auroville the Tamil people are there to be engaged, included, benefitted and won over but they are not the main focus of Auroville. This is a UNESCO experiment / example of cross-cultural harmony.

When The Mother died a civil war ripped through this place when the village of Auroville broke with the Ashram to the south (in Pondicherry). No taxation without representation – the village had become its own person. This civil war’s battles included beatings and bombings as the Ashramites and their patrons (who in some cases had been granted tracts of land as burial places) tried to re-assert control over Auroville.

On the street here I can bike around, eat great food, meditate in a technically perfect space, use superfast email (for India), and have a great conversation with people about why they came here and what they are up to – seems everyone has some public or private passion they are cultivating. What are absent are the attractive girls in the 20 to 30 range – seems they leave to see the world at that age and few fresh manless females join the community. My impression is that this place is the concept of and is currently under the stewardship of the 40 to 60 year-old crowd. It does not feel like the latest radical concept of my peers (which is what? by the way. If you have any ideas please sign the guestbook with them!).