Tamil Nadu

After a few days back in Bangalore, our friends Sam and Noémi arrived from France. Sam is a researcher at Météo France, and Noémi is a science teacher. We immediately took them shopping and Noémi bought a salwar kameez. Then we reserved bus tickets for Kancheepuram, a temple town about 5 hours from Bangalore. We arrived around 7, which was fine except that the bus driver decided to drop us off in the middle of nowhere, on the highway. We were apparently the only passengers going to Kancheepuram; the rest of the bus was an express to Chennai. So rather than taking a detour to the Kancheepuram Bus Station, we were left by the side of the road. There was one rickshaw but someone else flagged it immediately. He offered to share it with the four of us, but we didn't think that would be very easy. We waited around for a while, until finally a local bus appeared. We hopped on and were greeted with some friendly stares and very simple conversation.

Happily we found our hotel without much difficulty. Most of the hotel employees were 10-year-old boys who took every opportunity to come into our rooms. They seemed extremely tickled by us, and kept coming back to bring soap and towels, dividing up the tasks into as many possible small errands as possible so that they could bring their friends.

In the morning we headed for the temples on bicycle, which was very hot and dusty. The temples were interesting, though not as memorable as what we had seen in Hampi and Halebid, particularly because certain portions were closed off to non-Hindus. We saw a famous tree that is older than my country, as a drunken man from Madurai once boasted, but it seemed to be dead. We also saw more trained elephants; I found one of them particularly charming.

Kancheepuram is renowned for its silk industry; supposedly the first silkworms were smuggled to India in a Chinese princess's hair centuries ago! We could not go without the mandatory silk factory tour, so we visited a saree shop. We were shown different types of looms and visited a weaver's room. The loom took up most of the room, but there was a separate kitchen and bath. It seemed that the weavers slept underneath their loom, possibly on the floor. They had some fancy French Jacquard equipment - this basically involved punch cards with design codes printed on to them: the weaver sticks in the card and voila! they don't need to design anything themselves.

After another journey on a local bus, we arrived in Mamallapuram, on the coast of Tamil Nadu. This is a small town that relies heavily on tourism, though they also have a local stone-carving industry. In the morning we ate at a beachfront restaurant and spoke with the waiter, who told us how most of the structures on the beach had been damaged by the tsunami. His restaurant seemed to have been recently repainted and perhaps refurbished. We watched ten brand-new boats being lowered onto the beach, all with names painted in bright colors on the side. They had been donated to the fishermen by businesses and foreign individuals, which seemed like a nice idea to us: buy a boat for a fisherman, and it gets named after you.

One of the more famous sites in Mamallapuram is the Shore Temple, which was somewhat disappointing, especially since it cost $5 to enter. I prefered this temple, which was hidden in the sand for centuries until it was excavated by the British. To me, it looked like a sand castle. Its elephant statue is apparently one of the most realistic in all of India. I suppose it must be life-size.

After one day in Mamallapuram, we took a bus to Auroville, an international intentional community north of Pondicherry. We arrived just before dinner, and were greeted by a small blonde girl who spoke to us in perfect French. We realized later that she also spoke Tamil and English, and as we sat down to eat dinner with her and her father she pulled out her cell phone to call her mother and started speaking German! Auroville is apparently quite a multilingual community, though it is dominated by French, German and English, plus the local language, Tamil. The father, who owns a very beautiful house and guesthouse in Auroville and was one of the 6 original settlers, was happy to meet us, since he had questions about wind speed for Gilles and Sam and was also invovled in filmmaking. He might be contacting Gilles to help him measure the windspeed and construction requirements at an ecotourism site he is building in Coorg.

The next day, we visited Auroville on scooters, including the Visitor's Center at the giant Matrimandir, a huge golden sphere. Auroville was started in the 1960s by a female guru called The Mother. She came from France to help Sri Aurobindo, an early revolutionary and spiritual leader, in his work in Pondicherry. The community is supposed to welcome all spiritual, peace-loving people in the world, and they are supposed to work together in harmony and without exchanging money. The community is quite successful at producing cheese and jam, which we find for sale here in Bangalore. We were interested in learning about the education system and community projects in Auroville, but we were equally drawn to the beach maintained by Aurovilians, which is unusually clean. Anyway, we had a good time and a nice rest in Auroville, and it was fun to be in a French-speaking environment and to see lots of white people riding motorbikes.

Our next stop was Pondicherry, which is not really all that French, though it used to be a French colony. The small French quarter, where the Europeans once lived, is actually nice and colorful, unlike the rest of the city, which is as noisy and crowded as other places in India. We had a good time walking around and even ate some wood-fired pizza. We didn't get to visit the Aurobindo Ashram, which is the attraction for many foreign people visiting Pondicherry, since we had to leave the next morning at 7:30 to make it back to Chennai for our afternoon train. But we did get to sleep in one of their guesthouses, with portraits of Aurobindo and The Mother staring at us.