Can’t you be more normal?

Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a fishbowl. I go for a jog in the Greenbelt and tourists follow me around on their overburdened scooters, blowing exhaust fumes in my face as they ask for directions to the “main ro.” I take my kids to school and almost get run over by a parade of taxis. I go to the Visitors’ Center for a cup of tea and find myself standing in a line while cologne-doused shoppers order cakes and cookies.

They’re all here to see the new world – to visit the “Golden Globe” whose ubiquitous image now adorns tourist brochures and taxi placards all over the region; to peer at these strange creatures (“Aurovilians!”) who live such interesting lives. “You Aurovilians think in such a different way,” friends I meet in the real world often tell me – and it isn’t clear at all that different, in this context, is intended as a compliment.

When I moved back to this community, in late 2003, after a little over a decade away, it was just about possible to still inhabit the old Auroville. Sure, the world was crowding in. The signs were ominous – in the tin-shack developments coming up from the village, in the increasing number of vehicles kicking up dust on the roads – but there was a residual sense of emptiness and stillness, a feeling of getting away from it all. Things were noisier, but there were still corners of silence, and a sense of continuity with the Auroville in which I had grown up.

Most of all, what I came home to, and what I cherished, was a feeling of space, both within and without. In Auroville, it was possible to imagine leading an inner life: a life of contemplation, of yoga, of spirituality, whatever you want to call it. After so much time out in the real world, I was looking forward to a little more balance – more perspective, freedom from all the exigencies and mundanities that so straitjacket life out there.

I understand that time moves on. I know we can’t – mustn’t – stay stuck in the past, and that it’s important to be open to the world. (But, why, actually? Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon, but there’s very little I see in the world these days that seems worthy of inviting in). I understand, too, that Auroville’s economy is in crisis. (Hasn’t it always been?). I’m told that industries have closed, that tourism is the new lifeblood of our fledgling alternative society. All those sweaty visitors who know little and care nothing about Auroville, who drive around staring and pointing at me like I’m an animal in a zoo? They’re paying for our maintenances, our schools, our roads. (Then again, we wouldn’t need so many roads if there weren’t so many sweaty visitors on them). All those shops and souvenir stalls selling commodified versions of the yoga; all those restaurants whose pizzas and desserts attract eager, hungry consumers from distant metropolises: I guess they’re necessary to sustain the dream.

But I look at pictures of the old Auroville – those classic photos by Dominique Darr, Anita Reichle, Barun Tagore. Black and white, open, limitless landscapes. I remember those vistas well, I can still feel their freedom, and the stunning silence. These days, I can’t help but reflect on the fact that we began from a blank slate. We really had a chance to create something radically different, something fundamentally new.

Human nature is so persistent. I fear that what’s emerging from that early tabula rasa is a dreary archetype: the interesting, slightly offbeat, multicultural, artsy tourist town. Bali, Ibiza, Goa. Not long ago, a friend of mine asked a young visitor what she liked about Auroville. “It’s such a nice place,” the visitor said. She was the friendly, chirpy type. “We like to come here because it’s cheaper to party than in Goa.”

And so they flood in from around the country and the world: eager to party, to eat organic food, to take a selfie or two against the Golden Globe. The really adventurous ones are even a little curious, interested in sampling – but only sampling – a different way of living. They spend a few nights, maybe a few weeks or months; they volunteer (and all the while, of course, they party, cheaply). Then life resumes and Auroville is like a set of rented clothes, worn for a time before slipping back into a more familiar costume. A story to tell back home. A box to check. A gap-year experience before that job in banking or consulting or marketing.

The world is what it is. There’s no point railing against the system. (This is how beaten down we are: once we believed we could change the system). And in a way, we only have ourselves to blame. We were the ones given the blank slate, and we chose how to fill it. For so many years, even after the land had been planted and the desert heroically conquered, there was nothing to see in Auroville. Tourists don’t come for forests; they’re not interested in taking selfies with homes, schools, people working silently, patiently, humbly. But silence and humility – quiet achievement – weren’t enough for us. We wanted to build a showcase: apartments, boulevards, parks, cultural centers (so many cultural centers!) – a real city. And so we steamrollered all cautionary voices with appeals to purported divine sanction. We responded to resistance with government grants and funds that “must be spent.” Architecture is always ego. This slow, depressing mauling of our landscape: we’ve invited it on ourselves.

February is always the cruelest month. It’s cooler, easier for the visiting hordes to experience Auroville without having to sweat or endure power cuts. Then there’s that week, packed with activities and workshops, a chance for people to experience the spiritual life through pilates classes and reiki readings. Tourists in February dress in white kurtas and walk around with beatific stares. They have piercing blue eyes. Sometimes they look at me and I’m dressed in scruffy shorts and an old T-shirt, maybe stressed out by some everyday trifle, and what I see in their eyes is… pity. They feel sorry for me that I haven’t achieved the same level of serenity and self-awareness, that I’m still, after all these years, just an ordinary, harried human being. The thing is, I’m not on holiday. I’m probably late to pick my kids up from school, rushing to get my groceries before the shelves are empty – or just desperately trying to avoid the hordes.

This February promises to be worse than ever. Casual tourists, VIPs, journalists, movie stars, celebrity chefs, reality TV personalities, sports heroes, all sorts of people with tenuous connections to the place: they’ll descend upon us, and for weeks and probably months we’ll be at their mercy. I get it. Auroville is commemorating fifty years – a remarkable achievement by any standard – and we feel we need something to show the world. The world wouldn’t recognize what we’ve actually achieved in these fifty years; it’s afflicted by a particular blindness. There was a time when we called out that blindness, when what we were trying to do – at least this is how I understood it as a child – was to open the world’s eyes. Now we cater to blindness; we play the game on the world’s terms.

Is it too late to change course? Can we roll back the tides of development and commerce and normalization (“You Aurovilians are so strange, can’t you be more normal?” my friends in the real world sometimes ask me)? I showed an early draft of this article to a friend. She told me I was being too negative. I thought maybe she was right. I had just endured a bad few days. The usual motorcycle missiles coming at me on the roads, the serenity of a visit to the Matrimandir shattered by a VIP security cordon.

So I went for a walk behind my house, through the green Aurodam forest, under a canopy of work and palmyra and banyan. It had been raining and the trees were dripping and the soil was muddy. It was invigorating, inspiring. That forest is a treasure. It reflects decades of exactly the kind of hard, patient work we so undervalue: a real, tangible achievement, Auroville’s gift to this warming, melting, self-destructive planet. Then I walked onto the football field – one of the last expanses of open land in the community – and the sun was setting behind the palmyras, and I sat on the muddy ground, and it was quiet, and for a moment the world felt at bay.

Then I remembered. A plan is circulating to build a huge concrete structure over this field, right up to the edge of that forest. The Petra Project: office space, a shopping arcade, a massive new visitors’ reception center. Many in the community have expressed their opposition, but the machinery – and the lobbying – is well underway. Fundraising is in process, architects and consultants are developing plans and models. Many of them don’t even live in the community; but Auroville is always fertile ground for another line in a CV, a feather in the cap for the ambitious and ruthless.

That field will be dug up and concreted. The forest will be littered with plastic. The visiting hordes will grow, and they’ll spend more, eat more, consume more. It comes down to this. Inner space needs outer space. Inner work needs an external supporting infrastructure. We say we’re here to do the yoga, but we give the yoga no room to breathe. We say we’re here to do something different – but we’re stuck in this mad headlong rush, so persistently and stubbornly, so blindly, to just build the same damn thing.