I know I’ve painted a rosy picture of my time here, and it has been amazing, but I don’t want to forget that I am living like a queen in the poorest state in India. This is a place where emaciated animals roam, where sewage flows in the streets, where large families live in one room keet huts. This is a place where the celebrities are plump by American standards, because being skinny is a sign of poverty. This is a place where jewel-like plastic bags litter the street and are burned, poisoning the air and ruining people’s lungs. This is a place where a good husband consists of one who has a job, doesn’t drink, and doesn’t beat you. This is a place where disease runs rampant, and many children die of malaria before the age of five. This is a place where little kids are abused in school if they can’t come up with tuition, and many aren’t allowed to go to school at all.
This is also a place where I could send one student to university for a year with a hundred dollars. With fifty I could help a battered woman start her own business. For twenty I could send a dentist to look at the teeth of a whole school. With ten I could pay one small child’s tuition at the government public schools. With twenty-five cents, I would make sure one person was safe from malaria for one year. If I were to stop buying frivolous things, I could probably buy one family a house with a real roof, so that they could better survive the monsoon disease-free. If I decided I didn’t need trinkets and souvenirs, I could get every village kid I know a new cycle or a school uniform or all their textbooks. If I decided that I could go without lunch every day, I could plant a hundred fruit trees to help clean the air and feed people who go hungry.
I won’t go without lunch, and I will bring people presents, but I’m just saying. I’m just saying. I just need to remember who I am, and who is around me, and be grateful for the people and the institutions in Auroville that are trying to help these situations that I see and care about. Our program has a surplus, and we are donating money to some places, and that makes me feel good. A lot of money actually. But we can also help in our daily lives, all the way over there in the great land of America. We can still live like royalty, but we can try not to poison the air and the water, we can try not to buy foods that have been all pesticidey, we can try not to buy products that were made in sweat shops, we can try to ride our bikes sometimes and use cloth grocery bags sometimes. We can just try to live in a sustainable manner, because our actions and our use of our consumer powers show what we believe in. Maybe it can even turn our own country in a new direction, and this will help the countries like India which have been left behind the industrial revolution, like India which depends on us to buy their exported things. We can dictate the conditions under which those things are made if we support free trade products or choose to only buy organic cashews or something. There are things we can do without even changing how we live at all.
I have to leave this place soon, and I don’t want to. I can’t wait to be home, but I don’t wish to leave. South India is amazingly beautiful and diverse and full of culture and light and spirituality. It is also full of people who are trying to make a difference. I will miss this place. Thanks to everyone who helped get me here. Thank you so much.
