The Mother

Jane and I are currently staying at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram's guest house. Who is Sri Aurobindo? This ignorant traveler still doesn't quite know, but I do know that he and "The Mother" - a French woman who made her home here in Pondicherry- co-founded a religion. I also know that stern pictures of them stare down at me from the walls of my room and that sort of freaks me out a bit. Whenever I say something silly I see the Mother in the corner of my eye admonishing me and wondering why I don't just pay more attention to myself and my surroundings since, as I've gathered from her quotes posted around the walls and replenished in the check in area each day, heightened awareness brings us closer to enlightenment. Whatever that means.

India is the only place I've ever been that plays host to such a wide variety of people- foreign tourists with flowing scarves and an appetite for wine, native Tamil people who have no need for shoes, even when they're riding long distance buses, and women covered almost head to toe, but are still in internet cafes- simultaneously, while seeming to give each of them something to be happy about. No wonder "pagal" a Hindi word that I loosely translate as "crazy/mad" is so popularly thrown about in film, that's really one of the only ways to explain this place.

Oh yes, and dirty. Today I had one of those moments where I felt like screaming "LET'S JUST CLEAN THIS BLOODY PLACE UP!" Why, on the coastline, in coconut tree groves, and throughout every city are there piles of filth? Why does every gutter or crevice seem to be filled with repugnant, stagnant, stanky water? I know that there are reasons. This is the world's largest democracy and plays host to more than a billion people and is practically the definition of contradictory, but please, can't we just set up a garbage system that isn't just the poorest and lowest caste people being made to haphazardly pick at and then redistribute waste? China certainly felt more polluted, but India has got dirty cornered.

Enough for now, must get back to the guest house before curfew. Since I breezed through the Babysitter's Club Book I bought on a whim today, I can now settle in for some more highbrow reading and feel slightly better about the Mother's glare.