Part 16. Over to the east coast.
We wanted to see what the community was like on a commune just south of Pondicherry, we'd met an American couple who raved about it, some farming, some building and sustainable fishing alongside meditation and personal development, made it sound practical as well as idealistic. On the way we could visit an ashram just south of Bangalore, towards Mysore that would make a good staging post and we took local buses to do the journey.
Ashrams varied from place to place, this one, dedicated to the memory of a deceased teacher whose yoga and meditation techniques were written and carried out by a team of dedicated followers. You paid whatever you could afford and stayed in simple accommodation “cells” not unlike the place in Goa but in blocks of maybe 100 or more. At any one time about 120-150 people would stay and do prescribed routines under a resident teacher, in groups of about 20.The rest of the day was spent maintaining the ashram, cooking, cleaning, gardening or whatever else you had skills at.
The food here was simply wonderful, largely grown on site, prepared by devotees for the rest of the devotee community it was entirely vegetarian. Sumptuous salads made from spiced vegetables and fruit, cooked vegetables with delicate balances of herbs and spices leaving much to taste of the ingredients themselves, but some to carry the sauces made to enhance anything plain. Some ingredients stuffed into wafer thin Dosa casings and all served on cut banana leaves, eaten with your fingers and no two meals the same. They served food twice a day to 200 or so visitors and residents in a huge refectory. Southern Indian vegetarian food at it simplest and best. They served tea and coffee grown on their estate and I have never, ever, been anywhere else where the food was so much to my personal taste.
We stayed a few days, rising early for meditation and doing devotional yoga for a couple of hours in the afternoons. We would have stayed longer but they suggested (not unreasonably) that as westerners we should be paying more than we were able, basing it on a proportion of an average wage. We only had the dwindling travel funds that we had and still had a fair amount of travelling to do so we thanked them and moved up to Bangalore for a look at the city before travelling on.
Southern India had ( I think) a much higher proportion of Buddhists than the north, or at least it was how it seemed. I was much more drawn to the Buddhist centers that the Hindu ones, although the Hindu shrines, altars, carvings and music were just as wonderful to behold and the rich history of the gods and tales of bravado, love and compassion were spellbinding.
Bangalore was a bustling but business like place, not so in your face as Delhi or Bombay, less tourists, less organised begging and a strange hangover of colonial England. People would chat and discuss our journey, our home-life, they would refer to England as a sort of absent mother figure, checking with us as to who was currently on the throne and who was prime minister. When asked what we did we would say that Hillary was an artist and I was a candle maker and that often led us to be taken to galleries and shops, not to be sold things but to be shown things by local artists and craftsman. We took tea with a couple of artists who had a gallery in a market and then were introduced to all the other stall holders ,some selling incense, jewellery, saris, brass-ware and those amazing 3D pictures of Shiva and Shakti, Ganesh and other popular deities.
We travelled on to Pondicherry, but the commune there wasn’t having visitors, didn’t want newcomers and seemed to be a very Americanised, pay to visit, pay to work there, a 'paying guests only' business enterprise. Highly unwelcoming .I think we'd missed its early idealistic heyday. We went to a couple of beach bars and decided to move on. We bought a bottle of cheap whisky to take back as a thank you, for our friend who’d taken us sailing and caught a bus to take us back to Goa.
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