Hei, god dag! First one!
Hei, god dag!
In the first two months of archival work I’ve been lucky to meet so many interesting characters and new places. And, since close-ones were asking for more elaborate updates, I thought it’d be nice to start a mini-blog. This will be (hopefully) an update every third day (+book, flower, quote), separate posts on a historical “foundling”, and maybe even random pictures! As I will also do some backlogging, blogs probably won’t be chronological. The goal is to be consistent but I don’t want blogging time to interfere too much with new encounters!
3-9 December 2025
After some truly hectic traveling to get to Pondicherry, the 3rd of December I finally got rest as I checked into my first guest house in the Pondi area: New Creation. The mural pictures are from here. Even though my booking request through Auroville had ended in their spam email, Meera Bhai and the others at the guest house were still ready to give the warmest welcome upon my arrival! There are many dogs, and a few cats, roaming around the wonderful garden with lotus pond. As an Auroville project it also supports a boarding, primary, and preschool in the area, one of them being right next to the guest house.
After settling in, getting a Kinisi e-bike, and having some rare quality bread at the Auroville bakery (separate bakery update upcoming), I headed to the Auroville archives to start some work. After a year, I got to reconnect with the wonderful and funny archivist Varun and we almost straightaway found out about the World Union journal, with a lot of relevant information for my research!
Saturday was my first time in Auroville’s golfball, aka the Matrimandir. All in all, the visit felt genuine and refreshing. The many Aurovillians who guide you through the temple are wonderfully diverse, blending 70’s New Age with an almost antique sense of devotional temple service. After a brief introduction, you enter the temple through the East gate and through a spiral stairway go to the inner chamber. The inner chamber is completely white-ish, surrounded by pillars, and has a translucent ball on top of four Aurobindo-styled shatkonas, through the glass sphere sunshine is re-directed by a heliostat on top of the temple. Focusing your meditation on the glass ball in the middle induces an optical illusion where the entire room blackens, and people turn to shadows. For the rest of the days, I took it easy, drove around the unending and serene pathways around Auroville on my bicycle, and spent one day at Aurobeach. Thanks to Auroville’s openness, I got to know a lovely French couple over my breakfasts at the kitchen, a witty Russian lady who is also working at the archives, and Uma who created Upasana!
A book recommendation from my reading on Aurobeach is H.G. Wells’ The World Set Free. It is a chilling yet hilarious prediction on the potential of nuclear catastrophe written in 1913, a time when atomic bombs still seemed a total fantasy to many!
Just now I saw Meera Bhai standing with a flower, which her friend gave to me. It is a Pigeon Orchid (first photo), a small flower that was probably named as such because it somewhat resembles a pigeon. The funny thing about this flower is that its flowering is “gregarious”, if you’re in need of a 1922 paper that goes into this theme with as topic the Pigeon Orchid, read _The Gregarious Flowering of the Orchid Dendrobium Crumenatum. _
While I was reading K.D. Sethna’s The Indian Spirit and the World’s Future today in the archive, I found this beautiful line he quotes from Tacitus: “Ubi solitudinem faciunt, paces appellant”, often rendered as “They make a desert and call it peace”, although “desert” could just as well be “solitude”. Sethna compares it to the dead peace of colonialism. Tacitus put the words in General Calgacus’s mouth to inspire courage in his troops, yet the line is also read as a critique of the desperation created by imperial politics. To me, it additionally rang psychologically true of false solitude!
