I have moved to Sadhana Forest, a project on the coast of Tamil Nadu State, 100km south of Chennai, at least temporarily. I came here on a long weekend getaway from Bangles. Don't get me wrong, I still like it there and think it is the best urban environ for me in India, but foreigners need to get out once in a while (not every weekend though) to see other things in this big country. My life at Maaya was fairly contenting, but still a bit incomplete. Despite the fact that Manju is around most of the time to hang out and is great to commiserate with on occasion, there still weren't enough people around to fit my needs. So, I've come to a place where I can interact with 50+ strangers anytime I want. About half of the people here are Israeli too, so it's got an interesting sort of anti-kibbutz atmosphere about it.

The schedule is as follows: yoga in the morning, breakfast, manual labor, lunch, free afternoon, dinner, talk time, bed. We compost our shit into humanure, which doesn't smell as bad as you might imagine so long as you use sawdust and keep the urine separate. The food is vegan, but you can get other sinful snacks in the surrounding Tamil villages. The cost is $20 for two weeks to cover food and some basic hygiene supplies. This is an ecovillage (solar panels and sustainably built huts) that works to reforesting the tropical landcover that existed here before British and French colonial admististrations had it cut down. The topsoil is bright red clay like Georgia and I heard that before the work began thirty years ago, the ocean would turn blood red during the monsoon. It is a wasteland reborn as something completely different.

I haven't spent too much time in the town this project is peripherally situated in: Auroville. It has less than 2000 residents from all over the world and the majority of them seem to be older idealistic Europeans. These people are hard to locate in any systematic fashion so I spent most of my time exploring via old Indian bicycle (it's still a relatively small place) and stopping to talk to people in places I find interesting. I think it would take a long time to make sense of all the different projects, policies, and histories of this place... but it would be worthy of a long term social analysis... I'm sure one's been done. What they don't have, amazingly, is wifi access of any kind. Bangles is seriously outdoing them on this front.