from the horizon

I don’t do things by halves, so when I’m going to fail at something, I’m going to do it properly. The goal had been to take a year off, travel the world without the bondage of a job, without the certainty of employment.
I lasted a stunning one… week.

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The main event for bringing me to India at this particular time was a Training of Trainers which was organized by RedR (Register of Engineers for Disaster Relief) India. I has attended another on of their training in Humanitarian Logistics 3 years ago. For the past couple of years training had occupied a significant (and the most enjoyable) component of my work, as in order to successfully implement a database, staff had to be trained to use it, so I thought that it was time for me to learn how it was done. I felt that I’d got pretty good at delivering trainings, but this course was a welcome eye opener!

The lead trainer was Stephen Blakemore from the UK, who had a long history in human resources and staff development in the humanitarian sector. He was a brilliant trainer, and held our attention over the 5 days without resting on the crutch of PowerPoint slides, but with an innovative use of other props, such as a bicycle horn (great for getting attention), Post-It notes (helpful for collecting ideas and feedback), Ipod and speakers (what’s a training without a soundtrack?), and cartoons:

He also has this website, which provides a newsletter on training: http://www.nomorefruitsalad.co.uk/

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I left New Zealand with very similar baggage as I had left with for the first time back in 2005. It has been a while since I have been able approach a check in counter without having to worry about how overweight my check in will be, able to carry, rather than wheel, my luggage. I wasn’t going somewhere to live or to work: I was travelling again.

To India. I have always regarded India as a rather challenging travel destination, and I have had friends tell me how it will be a mind blowing experience. I haven’t spent a huge amount of time here yet, however I’m finding it all very… easy. Perhaps it is all relative, and after living in Indonesia, there is just a certain degree of inconveniences, communication difficulties and cultural misunderstandings which I take for granted. Sometimes you’ve got to squat and there usually isn’t toilet paper. Get used to it… and carry hand sanitizer.

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After the course and before my flight I had one day in Chennai to have a look around. Here are some random photos:

Arrrrg! Here be pirates! Taken outside one of the oldest surviving British church in India.

Respect for Gandhi. Not only did they build numerous statues of him, but around this statue they built a scaffold for people to come up and put flowers around his neck for India Independence Day.

Also worth was the Tomb of St Thomas, one of Jesus’ Apostles. It’s kinda crazy to think that he made his way all the way to India back then. I was kinda awe struck by the small bone fragment of St Thomas, a physical connection to all those biblical tales.

Well the whole point of my trip to India (and why the NGO had paid for it) was for me to attend a four day RedR (Registered Engineers for Disaster Relief) Humanitarian Logistics Course.

I’ll go into a bit of detail for the benefit of those people who have no idea what logistics is about (this would have included me 3 months ago!). Read the rest of this entry �

After Pondicherry I made my why to the utopia of Auroville. Auroville was founded in 1968 by The Mother, who was a follower of Sri Aurobindo. It intended to be an experiment in people living in “progressive harmony”. Based on the idea that humanity is not the last rung on the evolutionary ladder, Auroville plans to be an accelerator for the next step. I should probably point out that Auroville isn’t really set up to accept “tourists”, and I only spent one day there, so my observations are really just first impressions.

The Vistor Centre

The Town Hall

The settlement contains around 1780 people from all over the world, spread over 20km. So I hired a bike and bravely set off to explore this new world. For the most part all I seemed to see were trees growing out of the red ground. One of the settlers later told me that they thought that their greatest achievement was the planting of over 2 million trees. It certainly is more luscious than the rest of India (at least what I’d seen). However I failed to see much more progress than that.

This may have been because the whole settlement was very dispersed. It was designed in the shape of a spiral galaxy; unfortunately no one remembered that galaxies are notoriously difficult to get around. I thought this was a rather large slipup which meant most people had to use petrol consuming motorbikes or cars to get around. So they’re not quite self sufficient!

I did visit the Cynergy, who were a small group that did computer programming outsourcing in the community. It was headed by a guy who was raised on the community. Definitely a different spin on Indian Outsourcing!

The highlight of the community is the Matrimandir, which is a temple/meditation center/ spiritual soul/giant golden golf ball in the middle of Auroville. Current it was undergoing extensive maintenance work, something to do with the gold panels not being attached properly. I managed to have a look around it, and then noticed that the Indian construction workers didn’t really seem to mind if I went inside (which I probably shouldn’t have!). I had heard amazing things about the interior, but it all seemed to be covered with plastic sheeting. I’m not sure if I made it into the main chamber, but it was an eerie feeling being inside. Kinda like I was exploring a lost temple!

Interestingly I met a couple of Dancers from California at Auroville who’d been in India training to be Yoga teachers. They’d had a lot of experience working in cooperative communities, egalitarian structures. They said it was very hard to make decisions, and often what happened was that the loudest person just got their way. They talked about consensus minus one, someone’s always unhappy!

Does cooperation really lead to the best decision being made? Can we have too much cooperation and not enough action?

Overall I was unimpressed with Auroville. I noticed that I always had this negative Hippy/Cult thought in the back of my head, despite my feeling that what they were trying to achieve here was very admirable, and important. I thought their was too much Yoga and Meditation and not enough Renewable Energy. I just got the feeling that there were too many spiritual types and not enough technical types.

Hippies on bike and windmills – kinda sums up my impressions

OK, there was some renewable energy

I thought about how necessary it is to have such a spiritual focus when setting up a community. I’m not sure how well spiritual, social and technical development can work together? I may leave that for another post.

In Mamallapuram I found myself in the middle of the Indian backpacker trail. I didn’t quite feel like I fitted in, I needed more dreads in my hair, authentic India clothes, or perhaps not to have arrived in the country the day before! It took me a couple of days before I really felt like a backpacker, and by that point my whirlwind tour of India was almost over!

Mamallapuram in famous for the stone carving around the city, dedicated to the some of the various Indian gods. There are some interesting temples, carved caves and other monuments which date back to the 7th Century.

It is amazing to think of the work the stone carvers put into these huge ancient carvings out of devotion to their gods. Now days the stone carvers still line the streets, chipping away making souvenirs, in worship of their new god – money!

Because it was a fairly touristy town, there were plenty of shops selling these statues, along with a variety of other gorgeous Indian handicraft. I’m sure I got thoroughly ripped off in some of my souvenir shopping, despite some shrewd bargaining (boy, can those Indians bargain back!).

One notable mention was one hawker trying to sell me some tacky “Karma Sutra” statues. I tried to explain to him that if I was caught taking them back into Aceh, I’d probably be whipped (Sharia Law and all). He then told me I should get them for my girlfriend. I told them if I did that I’d definitely be whipped! When another guy tried selling me the exact statues, I decided it was time to practice some of my Indonesian:

“Ma’af, saya tidak tau bahasa English” (Sorry I don’t know English)

Although this didn’t however deter him, he did drop his asking price by 80%.