Auroville, the city of dawn....

So, I landed in Chennai yesterday, and I went directly to Auroville, the Universal city in the making.

It's an international city founded in the 1970s by Sri Aurobindo, a famous guru or avatar, and his spiritual companion, a french lady called "The Mother". She choose a place in the India map, and the follower found that it was a deserted place, with only a isolated banyan. This is a sacred tree in India, because with its areal roots it can multiply itself till infinity, so they decided to put a temple in the place of the banyan, and they called it the Matrimandir, and to found a city there. A city belonging to no nationality, but to the unity of mankind.

As I went out the airport and found my taxi driver with my name on a piece of paper, as it is in the movies, I was approached by a guy who wanted to share the taxi. He said that the Matrimandir is a really powerful temple, and that people are dragged in Auroville by a force, maybe your suconscious or the "super mind", but there is something, a click inside you that goes on when you heard about it the first time, and you feel that you have to come here.

This was true for me, when my friend Siddharth first mentioned it to me, I wasn't even sure to come to India, but after reading a bit about Auroville and its ideals, I immediately felt that I had to go there.

You can read about the Universal city of Auroville in this site:

http://www.auroville.org/

While in this you can read about the daily activities in here....
http://www.auroville.org.in/

Try to read about it, and let me know if the click starts inside you as well!

A passage to India

Here I am, quiet and relaxed, in a airport lounge, after having experienced a week of anxieties and hysterias.


Actually I feel sorry for the people who were around me during these days, because they had to handle with me when I was completely crazy, overwhelmed by the mixed feelings related to the preparation of my first major solo trip in a Eastern country. As always, when I start something new, I do it in style. That’s why I choose India, the long lasting trip of my dreams. And that’s why I decided to spend there a month, this summer.

Now I feel really calm, watching my Airbus A330-200 while it is in preparation for flight, for the second flight of my travel day, Venice-Dubai. Yesterday I was really concerned with packing my luggage, I had to deal with a few big dilemmas, like: to bring the big backpack or not to bring it? To bring my Single Lens Reflex or not to bring it? Finally I decided to bring both, so now I have a big backpack and a little one as well, and I prepared my poor camera to afford the 80% humidity in tropical South India in a do-it-yourself fashion. I wrapped it with plastic! It will be a great experience, in any case... I'll let you know more...


P.S.
Does anyone want to know what I brought to try to survive one month in India? Fine…

Among electronic devices I brought a net-book, two cell phones and my SLR. A torch with batteries for frequent electricity black-out. A little lamp to read at night.

I bought a first-aid kit ready to use. Medicines: finally I decided to buy the discussed Malarone, so expensive and not surely useful against malaria, Grapefruit Seed Extract, Tea tree oil, Aspirina, Tachipirina, Yogermina lactic ferments, and an anti-biotic called Bassado, Integrator of Magnesium and Potassium. Solar cream and sun glasses. Two or three different hats.

I am going to buy a mosquito repellent in India, to be sure that it’s apt for Indian mosquitos. I already have a mosquito net and a sheet impregnated with mosquito repellent.

For the travel I have an inflatable neck cushion and an eye mask; ear plugs for the noisy night of big cities like Chennai.

Three lockers and a chain for bicycle to lock the backpack while travelling by train. Two hygienic paper rolls and nappies.

Three T-shirts and three pair of trousers. A pair of sandals and a pair of trekking shoes. An Olympic bath-suit and glasses.

A binocular. Photocopies of documents and tickets.

A little bag to fix with the belt.

London vegan café!

Vauxhall in London is a brand new quarter, and a really bon ton one. It’s a place where you easily meet men in suits and women with heells walking home from their nine to five job, among the clean streets with flowers in the balcony. It’s not exactly the place where you expect to find a bohemienne place like the Bonnington Café.

This is not the kind of place that you  find easily in the city of London.

It's a café - vegan restaurant, run by a cooperative of motivated cooks from all over the world. 

The Café was started in the 80s as a squat Café to provide a good cheap meal for the community. This goal hasn't changed, and you can still find good food at a reasonable price there.

You can read about it in their website:

http://s208303316.websitehome.co.uk/about.html

I suspected that the place was a special one when my friend said that we had to bring our own drinks, because the place hadn’t the license to sell it. That was the first hint. 

The second one was that the Mexican chica who welcomed us was really friendly and laid-back, she let us do as in our home, so we brought glasses to our table and arranged the tables in a shape suitable for fifteen people by ourselves. Crowded but cozy.
I was with a group of  people of the Polish Professionals in London, the fast growing association of which my friend is president.

You can see their website here:

https://www.polishprofessionals.org.uk/podstrony/about-us.html

The lunch was organized by a nice girl who had just gave up her job to start her own activity in her brand new agency concerned with cross-cultural mediation and non violence. That was indeed the right place to meet this kind of people!

The place had no menu, but only a list of vegan plates written on a big blackboard. Really similar to the place where Amelie worked in the movie Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain!

Between them we chose the Mediterranean Pie and the Spanish bites, and my friend Adam ended up having a Vegan Pineapple Tarte, after some initial exitations.

The Mediterranean Pie was made with soy "crumbles", also called "ground burger". These are soy food products that resemble cooked ground beef. 

Apart from it, it was made with peas, aubergines and onion, covered with a spicy sausage of diced tomatoes and aromatised with cumin, pepper, tabasco, garlic, and chili powder, and served with salad, lentils and olives.

Afterwards, I decided to have a look at the place, and pretended to go to the toilet.
In the first floor there was a board with the centre activities:  weekly literary kitchen, daily yoga at dawn, tarots reading, biocinetic massage, and a bunch of interesting activities.

They explained also that the place use only food provided by the local farmers of Elephant and Castel (this is the name of a area of London!).
Unfortunately, as I understood reading some paper on the wall in the second floor, the place is menaced by the development of the area, and it is possible that they make them close it in the near future.
When I came back to my table I was happy and at the same time a little bit sad that I cannot come to this place daily... The music from the movie ... Amélie Poulain was the perfect sound track of the evening, played by two dreamy players coming from another age....

Italia - Slovakia 0 - 2

Italia-Slovakia is one of the issue that is more and more discussed in these days, due to the match that will decide Italia’s future in the World Cup. Anyway, be warned, this post has nothing to do with vuvuzelas, waka-waka & co.

I know, the post name is misleading. Nevertheless, “the end justifies the means”, as you will understand in reading it.

   I agreed to host a Slovakian guy, our "football enemy" of the moment, on a very short advance, because I loved the email that he wrote me to ask. From that little hint I should have known that the man knew how to sell himself. In fact, I had to deal with a smart-looking guy, who is a creative and works for advertising agencies. At first, I was wary with him.

Let me explain, it’s not that I don’t trust advertisement people or sellers. It’s that I don’t trust myself with them. In the past I let them sell me a lot of stuff that I didn’t need at all, just by convincing me that I needed it, and they let me with a brand new encyclopaedia and a perturbing feeling of just being fooled. So now I’m a bit suspicious.

I told him that, adding that I worked for a marketing agency in Frankfurt-am-Main, and found it quite unappealing to me. He was curious, and he translated everything I said to his friend, who happen not to speak English very much. So I went on. I said that I didn’t like the job for two reason.

   Firstly, I spent half my life studying Arts, a subject related mainly with the masterpieces, the best creations that mankind managed to produce in the centuries, whereas the marketing deals with the average man, the average Joe, as they call him in the States. To me, people working in that marketing agency were totally committed to appeal to someone like him, and to me it was like trying to be attractive to Homer Simpson, let’s say. You should use a Duff Beer better than a Shakespeare’s line, I think.

    He replied that I was mistaken because it takes a lot of skill to "feel" the client, and to know how to appeal  to him, and a lot of creativity, so a creative director must be well aware of psychology and a bunch of other disciplines as well. That was a really good point indeed, and he scored his first goal. One nil for him.

    My second argument was that in working for a marketing agency I couldn't decide on which product develop the marketing strategies, so I was likely to end in selling something that I intimately disliked, like alcoholic drinks or unhealthy food, or expensive cars, and not feel to be useful for the society.

    To this argument, he counteracted with an even greater point. He said that in the past he was the creative director in a marketing company called Brossmann Consulting which was founded by the co-founder of Wiktor Leo Burnett.  Through its own foundation, he supports the unique charity system  called "Good Angel" (Dobrý anjel), for which my friend designed the most successful Slovak campaign. Here you can see the logo:

This organization helps out to families with children where somebody is suffering from cancer. To those families delivers Dobry Anjel every month small financial subsides from strangers - Good angels, who know names, addresses and diagnoses of suffering people they are helping. 
In fact, donor knows exactly to whom he/she is helping. Each donor, Good Angel, has own "angel ID" and password, which allows him/her to access their personal account on www.dobryanjel.sk. Here the donor has the possibility to monitor and control total amount of contributions, see names, addresses and personal stories of those, to whom the system Dobry Anjel distributes his/her money. 
Also, contributions are delivered to target families within the last cent. The money from already 72.000 existing Good Angels  are collecting through the month and re-distributed among the families (in same amounts) at the beginning of next month. All operative costs necessary for running the system of Dobry Anjel are paid from private accounts of its founders.

The system is unique in the world, and my friend with his creative work has contributed to make it even more widespread in Slovakia.

    Two nil for my Slovak friend. As I suspected in the first place, he was able to make me change my mind. And I’m happy about it.

PS

You can see my friend's Dobry Anjel campaign here:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6152775557&ref=ts#!/video/video.php?v=20584978761&oid=6152775557

A moving planet is coming to my place

Starting abruptly, I want to explain the title of this blog.
Moving planet...
Firstly, the planet is moving around me, and coming to my place through Couchsurfers from all over the world.
Never heard about Couchsurfing? It's a Network, a community on the Internet, connecting people all over the world. People who wish to host other people freely, just to share their couch and some moments with stranger travellers. Since March I am part of this community as a host and I'm planning to be a guest as well.
What's more, those meetings are moving because they often cause me very intense feelings and they make me wonder a lot.
Finally this experience is also "moving" in that it is the moving force behind many thinking, the stimulus to ideas that never occurred to me before.
That's exactly why I decided to open this blog, to write down the ideas that are coming to my mind by talking with these stranger visitors, and spread them to the visitors of this blog.

Ah yes, I will also share some of my pictures, taken by my Canon 1000 D, with Canon EF-S 18-55  mm and Sigma DC 10-20 mm. Hope you like them. The first one is a view from the Tonnara of Scopello.