A FRENCH CONNECTION

Tired of the hustles and bustles of corporate life, I and my friend Tanmayee decided to give a 3 days trip to some part of India. I had to travel to Chennai the given weekend to meet my best friend and to save me as well from his scourge ,invited because of not attending his m attending his marriage.

So eventually we selected Pondicherry to be our weekend destination. To our Luck, some of our college friends from Bangalore also agreed to be a part of our trip and thus began our Touré to Pondichéry.


I and Tanmayee reached Pondichéry on Friday evening and checked into one of Guest house of The Shri Aurobindo Ashram. We were not ready to spare a single hour sitting idle in the room, so immediately left the room for a quick stroll to see the places around. My immediate perception of the place was that it’s a small, quiet and a pretty little town. We went around the Ashram area and the Assembly and finally to the sea shore.

The sea has been always a thing of awe to me ever since i was a child, the sight of it always did the same thing to me even after so many years – Awestruck!! And Spellbound!! to its vastness ,Beauty and Power. Sea is Powerful, so powerful that when u are sitting on its shore and watching it, it takes away everything from your mind and leaves behind emptiness and tranquility which is normally not achieved anytime.

Leaving my description of the sea, let’s get ahead with the Touré. The sea shore was lined with guest houses, which were essentially old French buildings , the old light house and the old port( which has become a café now).To us the houses seemed to be like old timeless beauty showing off its grandeur and screaming about its grand history.
In simple words they looked Neat (very neat indeed), with huge windows and small silhouettés and the carved supports just below the roof.

The roads were so clean and laid properly ( I say laid properly as the edges were fine ,without dirt and was of some kind of cement tiles), that my friend joked as to they getting cleaned everyday with Surf excel. Everything looked as if has been placed daintily to make that area. The buildings looked like as if been neatly cutout from cardboard boxes and has been perfectly painted and pasted on the roads by a seasoned artist. This as said to us by a European traveler called Kate from Chelsea London, was the French Architecture. After our small stroll along the beach and the French colonies, we quickly went back to the guest house to receive our friends who had arrived a while earlier.
Everyone got ready and then our gang went to the ashram to have our early lunch (rather very early, lunch was between 11:15 to 12:15).As always said… a gang of girls can never keep silence, me and tanmayee ,for few hours had to keep telling all to maintain silence(as we had arrived earlier and knew the ways of ashram by then). One of them was even scolded by an ashram inmate.

After the pretty simple lunch (which kept us feeling light and dynamic throughout the day) we headed towards Auroville.There was a tour Bus of the Ashram which took us all to Auroville – a small township which was planned and designed by the esteemed Shri Ma.It was her dream, her sight (that there should be a place on earth which no nation can claim as its own and where money was not the Superior thing, where humanity dwelled in its purest essence , living and passing the spirituality to generation) that took the shape of Auroville.Shri Ma was a French lady , who was the Spiritual partner of Shri Aurobindo.
Her imagination, dream was shaped out as the Auroville, a galaxy shaped township which had people from various countries residing in it with perfect peace and harmony.Auroville has two centres, one a geological centre- which is a banyan tree, and the architectural centre - which is the Matrimandir near to the banyan tree. The matrimandir has the world’s largest Crystal, weighing approx. 1 ton placed in its centre.Matrimandir has a very unique architecture, it’s a almost huge spherical structure, whose exterior is covered with golden plates and which has just one aperture in its apex ,wherein the light enters and falls directly on the crystal .This in turns lights up the room ( there is no other source of light) and when one enters into the dome, its completely closed and has nothing in it excepting a crystal in the center. In short it is a temple for meditation. To our Bad luck we were not allowed into it because of some construction work going on in it.

To me Matrimandir seemed to me like sun in between the galaxy, even in its appearance. At a distance of some 300-400 meters besides it was the urn in which soil of 180 countries were put, when foundation of Auroville was laid, two decades ago. All of us stood there for quite a while, taking snaps and looking at the man made beauty and also idling for sometime. We headed back exhausted to the cafeteria of Auroville, we filled ourselves with one the best tasting cakes and chocolate tarts.

Then our tour bus headed back. All of us spent the evening besides the beach. Sitting on Rocks, watching the sunset and then wandering on the streets near the ashram. it was republic day celebration and I suddenly realized that the battery in my camera was spent, I rushed back alone to the guest house to get the batteries .I couldn’t wait for someone else to click the photos as it was republic day celebration and the entire place, the governor house, the legislative assembly and all the places were decorated to its fullest grandeur.

The next day we got up very very early, it was about 5:30 that we were ready to start our journey to the sea shore and watch the rising sun .I, as a matter of fact all of us were thrilled to watch for the very first time ‘sun rising from the sea’. On my way to the shore I watched the early morning mass being held in the church. The prayers were like a symphony to my ears .With the light and fresh early morning breeze on my face and the symphony of the choir i walked towards the sea with a exuberance. Along side I saw many tourist as well as the local French kids, cycling down to the sea. We sat almost half and hour to finally see the Sun rising at the horizon. The sight before the sun rise was awesome and also the sight of the sun rising at the horizon. There were fish trawlers already at the sea and the sun sending its light to the waters, shimmering the waves in its presence made the whole appearance look very scenic and beautiful. For almost half an hour all of us were silent (this is a really big achievement for a gang of girls together) and the only sound we heard was that of waves breaking on the rocks lining the shore and the wind on our face. There cannot be any words that would aptly describe the beauty of what we saw and what we felt.

Getting ahead along with the journey. We had a small breakfast at the sea side café, and to our sheer delight, there were a flutist and a guitarist playing nice music which perfectly complemented the breakfast and the early morning sea – BEAUTIFUL!!.The Tranquility which I was so much searching for was finally achieved in this trip, though for a short while.

Then we headed to a small beach in the distance and had a great time playing along the waves and the beach. In the afternoon we had a great lunch - with good amount of sea food in a hotel overlooking the sea. I had eaten the best of ice creams at the hotel - Ajantha.At 4 pm we headed back to Chennai with silence in heart, sadness of the ended trip and also the hope and dream for another soon to come.

The twist in the tale is that , what we expected to be the end of all the beauty we saw was, just not the prefect climax, the perfect climax lay ahead all packaged and gift wrapped for us by the dear nature and its Lord. We accidentally got into a Bus( as we did not get another Bus – Thanks for that) that takes the By pass road to Chennai and not the sea side road. We had really planned to sleep, and then suddenly something happened. The climate changed to less of sun, more of fog, a nice chillness and to quite much of wind and the bus made its journey meandering through hills lined by small lakes. I was excited and happy to the core, I almost screamed in excitement to friend of mine over phone- Marvelous!!, awesome!!!! And had a bunch of bus people looking at me. It really didn’t bother, as because, we were again thrown into surprises of nature. Nature with all its gracefulness simply said us - Expect the Unexpected!!!.


Summing Up, Pondicherry did show us a lot about its French connection, with its design, with its cosmopolitan crowd (though it was a small place), with the food ( lotsa croissants and cakes which was not really Indian), with the buildings named in French, the ashram and with its Spirit, which was a essentially Indian but with A FRENCH CONNECTION ……