The War Within

'teach peace' the t-shirt tells
but non-violence has blurry borders
taste bubs and salivary cravings
bodily desires
under-ego plays strike
while consciousness dozes in
a bowling game divine
boiling breath balade
I'm a believer...

right

as long as they were happy...

I don't understand what's wrong with the human mind. Even in Auroville I hear the phrase over and over again "as long as they had a happy life". A happy life seems a legitimation for killing. It really makes no sense to me. It came up during an interview with an Aurovillian girl, talking about sustainability, listening to our needs rather than our wants. Yet, when it came to veganism, she told she still consumed meat. She lived in a farm, she said, and if she saw the chickens walking around, running freely, she could not think different than that those animals have a happy life. Ok, so far I can more or less agree. Even though you can not see the inner struggles of the individual chickens, the daily frustrations of a chicken life and the possible season-depression of the feathered chicken in fire hot summer, you could say that a free running chicken on a farm has a relatively happier life than one who is stuck in a crowded, inhumane factory farm without space to move.

But then a strange loop in thinking occurs: the chicken is happy (according to human judgement) so... I can kill her. This is one of the strangest conclusions I ever heard. Ok, I have been listening to similar analogies over and over again, sometimes featuring cows, pigs, rabbits, ... but in no case I was able to see the logic of the conclusion. What would give you the right to kill a happy living being. Wouldn't its happiness just be a reason to keep her alive? Is a killer less guilty of murder if his victim was happy before he/she was killed? Is it more legitimate to throw a bomb on Auroville, as most people seem to have a happy life here, then throwing it on a hospital for depressed patients or on a prison? Are we jealous of their happiness and do we like to see it destroyed as soon as they get it? I love the fact that organic farms are getting more popular, but organic meat from happy animals, come on! We don't need meat, we don't NEED to kill to fulfill any of our daily needs. We can perfectly deal without any deadly victims. any exploitations for their mothermilk or eggs And still, even those we tell they care, those we preach to live on a higher level of consciousness serve chicken rice in the Visitors' Centre and Tuna Sandwish in the Solar Kitchen.

Humans, if you plan to kill me, please do me a favor: kill me when I feel like dying, not when I finally am enjoying life.

Eco Cycle-Yatra- Hand Clap 'Choco-la-de' in Moratandi

Imagine, over fifty barefoot children in a circle, chanty South-Indian houses in the background, some curious dogs sniffing your toes, a group of about ten mothers observing from a safe distance, twenty volunteers from all over the world and... ' CHOCO-LA-DE' hand-clap smiles where-ever you look. This is the image that comes to my mind when looking back at my first Eco-Cycle Yatra experience last Monday (19/01/10). Since the launch of the project in September 2009, aiming to share, interact and connect with people from the villages surrounding Sadhana, this was the first time so many volunteers joined in.

We spend the afternoon in Moratandi, a village at walking distance from Sadhana Forest, so bikes were abundant this week. The fact that a Turkish body percussion expert taught us some techniques and songs beforehand -making music with our hands, legs, fingers- certainly put all of in the right mood for clapping and chanting. And the kids... they loved it too! Surprisingly, so did their mothers, fathers, the Tamil villagers passing by bike, passengers stopping in front of the spectacle,  all of them were eager to join in. Soon we were clapping hands with one villager after the other. It felt like giving out free five-fold high-fives. To put it in Lamie's words (one of our Korean volunteers): “everybody twinkle in eyes, singing, so beautiful, I had tears springing out my eyes. Wow!”. When everybody got the flow of the clapping game, Ana and Diego used the middle of the circle as a performance stage for a true Capoeira show.  After some hesitation, the first kids tried to imitate them and participated in the musical combat-dance, encouraged with loud cheers and songs of their friends and family.  Even one of the fathers showcased the flexibility of his Indian body with handstands and acrobatic stunts. He got a loud applause and a subtle suggestion by Ana that he would even dance better if he would abstain from alcohol. Hopefully he will leave a fragrance of pineapple juice when he dances with us next time :)

The ' Choco-la-de song'  caught on. Even five days later, during the chant-and-plant workshop in Children's Land,  girls and boys came up to us in the garden with inviting hands and a huge smile: “choco, choco, la, la, choco choco, de de, chocola, chocode, chocolade!”

Auro Sadhana hammock thoughts

One week in sustainable Utopia. I can't imagine that it is only and at the same time already one week ago since I entered the wooden steps of Sadhana Forest. Even more unearthly is the thought that it is today exactly two weeks ago that I set foot on Indian soil. So many things have happened, so many people I met in just two weeks, so many new thoughts (or at least recycled ones) in my confused mind,... In just seven days Sadhana Forest managed to make me cry. First because of the onion cutting (the amount of onions necessary to feed 110 people is impressive, also for my eyes), then because of the itching-and-I-should-not-scratch mosquito bites on both my legs, arms, belly and back. But most of all the beauty moves me, realizing that people who are living and volunteering here really live up to the philosophy of the founders while staying here: eat vegan, unschool your kids, make no business and participate actively in reforestation. A fifth aspect would be the eco-factor, which deserves a separate article later on, because, really, it is a completely new way of living, from going to the compost toilet to drinking dynamized happy water. Even my daily rhythm has changed, starting with waking up at 6 am, followed by a morning circle with over 100 people in which we make ooooooohm-sounds and play energizing handclapping games and ends in the hammock of the main hut, with a laptop (charged with solar energy during the day) on my knees around 10pm and finally a night in the company of rats, snakes and hundreds of little insects in my mosquito-net covered improvised bed with sticky sheets in the sleeping hut. The food is also different, even though I have been a vegan for more than a year now. My diet was mainly dominated by soy, corn and fried products: vegan burgers, cornstarch, fries, noodles wokked with oil and salt. Here the founders added some ingredients to the 'forbidden' list. Besides all animal products (meat, fish, eggs, diary, gelatine, honey), we are asked not to bring any sugar, sugercane, alcholol, salt, coffee, tea, masala, chili or any processed foods. All these foods have some ethical, environmental or social dillemma and are for this reason eliminated from our daily meals. Interestingly, none of the meals is cooked with oil, sugar or normal salt. To give a sweet taste to the porridge in the morning, we add jaggery, a natural sweetening plant. Salt is avoided, but you can put some Himalayan salt by yourself. Cooking without oil seems not to be a big problem. None of the food I have tried so far was burned and the absence of fat didn't change the tastiness.

I decided to live in an ecovillage, temporally, maybe one day for the rest of my life. I seek for freedom, understanding, peace... But at the same time I long to be with people who work towards the same goal, the same utopia of a world in which sustainability is put into practice, where people are conscious about the essence of their lives, themselves being part of nature, the world at large... I don't want to loose myself in spiritual vagueness, but I don't have the feeling I could easily get caught. How could you get caught in searching for the core of life, striving to reach 'Sadhana', seeing beyond the matrix of fixed thoughts? I am living about 45 minutes (by bicycle) from Auroville, a universal city in the making. Even after one week, the community aspect of Auroville is still hard for me to grasp. To me it still seems like a forest with some guesthouses between the green and some tourist shops with colourful hippie clothes and organic coffee and smoothies around the Visitors Centre and at the borders of the Auroville area. The upcoming weeks I will update you all about my experiences in Sadhana, my fieldwork (on Aurovillian Youth) and the challenges of living 'truly sustainable' in an utopian community. Is Auroville rally the city the world needs? Or is Sadhana Forest a better exanple?

Sunday morning medley

There’s still a little bit of your song in my ear
There’s still a little bit of your words I long to hear
without you, the world around me changes
the trees are bare and everywhere the streets are strangers

I heard there was a secret code that David played
and he pleased the lord
but you don't really care
for music, do you?

you can fall for pretty strangers
and the promises they hold
still, your silence can be beautiful
but also very cold

the Antichrist

One day in the train through the Netherlands. A easy way to make money while focused reading literature I otherwise would have read at distraction-speed at home, a perfect chat-with-strangers occassion and at the same time an act of promoting cheap environmentally friendly transportation (and a indirect protest against the privatization and therefore terribly expensive rates for Dutch railway traffic). My day started with leaving a beloved package of curls in Amersfoort. They disappeared in the BONGO, the Peacechild bus, to far away Copenhagen, the place where the wild things and soon other world decision/change makers are.

Talking to strangers, asking them to share a Blokker promotion ticket (purchasable for 27,50 euros, allowing two people to travel throughout the Netherlands from 9 in the morning until midnight), provided me with an interesting sample of Dutch population: an activist, a Protestant mother, a first year medical student in Groningen, an older women who used to be a teacher at a Montissori school, an Iraq illegial refugee talking about the refugee centre in the Netherlands and complaing about the phrase that seems to follow him everywhere he asks about possible Dutch paper: wachten, wachten. wachten. Wait, wait, wait.

First I took an energetic (and to my standards honestly attractive) climate activist to share a ride, then I witnessed my name in the editors section of a newly published book which made me smile, just some minutes later there was the Christian young mother with 7 weeks old baby Emmanuel who was on her way home to Zwolle. She used to work as a pharmacy assistent, but took some months off to care for her newborn next generation. When I offered her a ride for 5 euros (instead of 11), she didn't hesitate. I didn't only get a part of my ticket paid back, but got a free conversation all the way from Amersfoort to Zwolle. I told her about vegetarianism, breast feeding, Climate justice, about Food Inc, the fact the world food provision is mainly in the hands of 5 big commercial megabusinesses, while this power used to be shared by 100's of them. This was the moment she presented me to the Antichrist.

The Antichrist is part of a Bible story in the New Testament called 'the Revelation'. It is the last story of the Bible, talking about the fate of the earth and humankind, the apocalyps. I hereby don't refer to the story as it is written (as I did not read it yet), but just try to parafrase my co-traveller. According to the Revelation, there will come a day that all food provision is in the hands of one big business, a commercial monopoly. It seems unlikely, but if you know almost all food in the world is in the hand of only 5 big multinational businesses, it is no understatement that we are clearly approaching that time. On the day the food-dictatorship will be a fact, Jezus will return to the Earth to pick up all Christians and bring them straight to heaven. They will be saved from the terror that will follow. The first 3,5 years of the Christians left, the world will be more or less peaceful. Something will happen to the Jews, as they are (acoording to the Christians) also close to Jezus' beliefs and maybe they will even be saved right after the Christians. Still according to the Revelation (and now it gets even more scary) the people who are left on the globe, will be "coded" with a chip implant in their arm. The food-dictator, who is at the same time in political power, manages to keep peace for 3,5 years, then the tide turns. The Antichrist will come to the Earth and join forces with the food industry.The Antichrist is in every aspect the opposite of Jezus. If forgiving is an act that brings you closer to God and Jezus, because forgiveness, caring, love and compassion is the literal translation of these two well-known personification, then the Antichrist is a cold, calculated being, not allowing himself to forgive, treating others who used to be and are close to him as material you just throw away and step on as on a dying sigarette on the floor. The Antichrist does not care that forgiving brings your heart closer to Jezus, he would rather stick to stubbornness then talk and find a solution with those who ask for forgiveness and friendship. With the Antichrist, the world will end. It will be an end that will last for 3,5 years until everything of the world as we know it, is gone. Still, hopefully the predictions won't be as accurate as it seems...

The world would be tastier is it was made of vegan apple-vanilla cake

I can't stand it when people watch over my shoulder while I am writing. I don't know why, but it causes an instant writer's block in my head. No words want to be spotted while they are being in the proces of creation, as if they are scared to show their bare skin to the unknown light. Maybe that is why my writing lost its fluency, why my blog is relatively empty the last months, why I write and delete, write and delete, write and decide to leave it for a moment when I can say it all at once, in the right words, in the right order, in the voice that fits the situation.

Words are struggling with me. They try to put themselves in vague conceptual styles while ordering my fingers to write as a real social scientist. I fall in the trap of clichés of 'however', 'furthermore' and 'nevertheless'. I struggle back, but time falls short and deadlines give lazy words some meters ahead in the race towards graduation. Why does it feel as if I can't live fully, when words are blocked and leave my mind without oxygen? I can still scream 'Climate Change' in multiple languages, write it with question or exclamation mark, with a bit STOP-sign in front of it or make humans responsible for it in some anthropogenic phrasing. Seeing the whole picture would help... but it seems like that picture still needs to be taken. Why isn't the world made of vegan apple-vanilla cake. It would make everything so much tastier.

Think about It!

I might not have been an active blogger on this site during the last months, Therefore I invite you to read my Climate Change posts on this blog page

Comments are more than welcome :)

Freewriting, the neverending story of Meat and God

They asked an academic assignment, they got the flow of my thoughts. A freewriting exercise, writing down my thoughts for 10 minutes, without stopping, without looking back, without correcting, ... A stream of my consciousness online after some months of silence.

Assignment Cultural Anthropology: Freewriting on Auroville (Auroville is the intentional community in South India where I will do fieldwork for three months during the Winter and Spring of 2010)

I am a vegan, a strict vegetarian who is confused about the way the world has become what it currently is. Sometimes I think everybody is living in a bubble, a contradictory society in which most of our behaviours don’t make any sense, but nevertheless we continue our daily habits, just because we are used to it. One of the behaviours that shocks me most is the fact people eat animals. Most of the time I repress the thought and the reality of it, because it is too cruel to have those images in your head all day, but if I take the effort to reflect upon the meat my roommates are preparing while I bake my vegan burger and vegetables, it feels as if I am falling in a deep black hole through the burning middle of the earth and get boomeranged back to the kitchen where I stand dizzly staring at the red bloody intestines of what still was an animal some days before it landed upon that table. How often have I dreamt it was all not true, that slaughterhouses were a strange, horrible Halloweenfantasy, that nobody would even think of hurting, capturing and especially killing animals for no clear reasons except the craving for the ‘taste’ of ‘meat’. How often have I dreamt it was different, that eating ‘meat’ belonged to the past, that it was something humanity looked back upon with feelings of guilt and shame, just as they look back at genocides, slavery and wars. “We didn’t know better”. Maybe it will be like that in some decades. Maybe my grandchildren will ask me how I could stand growing up in a society where billions and billions of animals were kept in industrial ‘meat’factories as if they were insentient commodities, to be freely exploited from body to skin and mother milk, because humans are the top of the hierarchy and a so called God (in which many of them don’t believe anyway if they don’t feel like it) gave humans the power to do with those ‘beasts’ whatever they want. I don’t believe that a God, if he ever existed or still exists, intended this. I checked the Bible and the Christian God at least literally states on the third page of the Holy Book that the Paradise ought to be vegetarian. People are given plants and vegetables to eat. God does not say the animals are ‘free food’ , catch them, breed them and use them however you want. I have dreamt about Utopias for many years. As a child I already had the tendency to dream away and imagine myself in a world in which I was a talking cat fighting injustice towards animals. Nowadays, I am a student, fighting climate change (as sustainable goals seems to be more accepted to fight for than the causes that are closest to my heart and are in a way connected because eating meat does not only clash with some ethical visions, but also has an big impact on climate change as 18 percent or (according to recent research) even more) of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming are directly and indirectly connected to the meat and milk industry. Also taking action for human rights is seen as more socially acceptable. However, it always makes me sad to find people in Human Rights activism, who don’t see or don’t want to see the connections between environmental issues, animal exploitation and human rights violations.

Still, in Auroville I find hope. In my imagination it is the vegetarian Utopia I always dreamt of. At the same time I am realistic. I will not find the lost paradise that God in the Bible took away from human beings. Even in an intentional community there will always be human conflicts, misunderstandings about interpretations of values and morals, intergenerational and intercultural differences. In my research I took the sidestep from looking at food habits to focusing on youth, because in my imagination youth have the power or agency to choose if they follow in the tradition of Auroville as an Utopian, sustainable settlement or if they move out and search for another lifestyle abroad or in a neighbouring city. Still, I realize that I maybe see it too black and white. As an anthropologist it is absolutely not wise to think in dichotomies of ‘the traditional community’ versus ‘the modern West’. Of course it is not so polarized and I am curious how the Western lifestyles influences, or better said ‘interacts’ with the idealized and utopian lifestyle in Auroville, using alternative energy, eating local vegetarian food and working towards human unity by means of community living, sharing and spirituality.

I don’t know if I will find in Auroville what I am looking for. And I wonder if other Western people like me, who feel this attraction to India and in particular Auroville, also feel a certain discomfort with certain aspects of life in the West. I want to find out how this mechanism of attraction and imagination works and if expectations can ever be fulfilled if you have a certain idealized image about a community. But on the other hand I also want to know if young people who grow up in an environment that, according to me, is a great place to breed environmental values and sustainable food habits think of their community. Do they internalize these values or do they, just like some adolescents in the West get frightened and shocked by their culture and do they develop imaginations of ‘the other side of the world’, the call of the West?