The only reason we are here is that many years back, Ant read “The Life of Pi” which talks of the Pondicherry Promenade in chapter one. It seems a long way to come based on some fiction, let’s hope it’s worth it. Pondicherry was a French colony until 50 years ago – a lot of the French influence remains. The streets are “Rue’s”, the police are red capped gendarmerie, and the buildings could be in a French provincial town. But this is India after all so that still means auto rickshaws, cows, open sewers and Ashrams, for which Pondicherry is famous. We are here for Thai Pongal which is the Tamil celebration of harvest festival which involves firecrackers, decorated cows, chalk decorations in front of each house in the road, closed shops, but most disastrous of all, the completely unexpected “dry day”. And this in a town that is renowned in the area for cheap booze as the taxes are low. We continue to struggle with alcohol on this trip – however our ingenuity in this department knows no bounds. We ended up lying on the roof of the hotel at 11pm seeing Ganesh shapes in the clouds whilst drinking Gill’s gin and Bacardi Breezer from the mini bar as a mixer – an unusual combination but it worked –those clouds really did have some interesting shapes!
The Thai Pongal festival meant that there were loads of people out promenading on the 1.5 km sea front. We spent lots of time doing as the locals do sitting watching the huge rollers off the Bay of Bengal. We did not however resort to playing “chicken” with the waves which appeared to be the mating game of the local teenage population. Talking of mating, Gill pulled – as usual we appeared to be an object of great interest – we had to shake hands all the way along and whilst posing for yet another photo with yet another group of youths, Gill was treated to a surreptitious fondle of the bum – but her best “Memsahib” look soon put a stop to that nonsense. Ant shouting “get a room” wasn’t helpful…..
The town, laid out on a grid system is really charming and quiet with a French quarter (beautiful grey painted villas) separated from the Tamil area (nasty, shacky, tacky shops) by the canal. Our vision of said canal before we arrived was a sort of Venice with Cornetto salesmen on their gondolas – the reality was the only thing that this canal carried was the effluent from the sewers of the 200,00 people who live here… But we fell in love with the place – the local marketing line “give time a break” seems so true. There are no set pieces to see apart from the museum which was thankfully closed for the holiday so we didn’t even need to feel guilty about not going. We did however, had a full one day “wend” – shopping at the Ashram shop (the nearest we were going to an ashram again), having coffee at coffee.com, lime sodas at Hotel de Pondicherry and Le Café on the beach. We also attended worship at the heaving Ganesh temple where Gill fell in love! Laxshmi was the temple elephant who blessed people who gave money. She was huge but really gentle, collected the offerings in her trunk before passing them back to her mahout – but then blessing the giver with a skilful pat on the head. (See vid). This temple was in complete contrast to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception built in 1790 which was cold, empty and soulless by comparison. The third religion of this town is big and it’s the ashram of Sri Aurobindo and Mother – a French woman who came here in 1920s and shacked up with a guru – became a guru herself and they are now jointly venerated. We queued with our shoes off to see their samadhi, their tombs, venerated as a shrine in the ashram courtyard – it did nothing for us (maybe this was because we didn’t see the “please be silent” notices until we were leaving!). It does obviously mean a lot to a lot of people because there are plenty of those doe eyed westerners around town from the ashram. We haven’t connected. We have however connected with the town – thank you Pi, it was worth it!
The Thai Pongal festival meant that there were loads of people out promenading on the 1.5 km sea front. We spent lots of time doing as the locals do sitting watching the huge rollers off the Bay of Bengal. We did not however resort to playing “chicken” with the waves which appeared to be the mating game of the local teenage population. Talking of mating, Gill pulled – as usual we appeared to be an object of great interest – we had to shake hands all the way along and whilst posing for yet another photo with yet another group of youths, Gill was treated to a surreptitious fondle of the bum – but her best “Memsahib” look soon put a stop to that nonsense. Ant shouting “get a room” wasn’t helpful…..
The town, laid out on a grid system is really charming and quiet with a French quarter (beautiful grey painted villas) separated from the Tamil area (nasty, shacky, tacky shops) by the canal. Our vision of said canal before we arrived was a sort of Venice with Cornetto salesmen on their gondolas – the reality was the only thing that this canal carried was the effluent from the sewers of the 200,00 people who live here… But we fell in love with the place – the local marketing line “give time a break” seems so true. There are no set pieces to see apart from the museum which was thankfully closed for the holiday so we didn’t even need to feel guilty about not going. We did however, had a full one day “wend” – shopping at the Ashram shop (the nearest we were going to an ashram again), having coffee at coffee.com, lime sodas at Hotel de Pondicherry and Le Café on the beach. We also attended worship at the heaving Ganesh temple where Gill fell in love! Laxshmi was the temple elephant who blessed people who gave money. She was huge but really gentle, collected the offerings in her trunk before passing them back to her mahout – but then blessing the giver with a skilful pat on the head. (See vid). This temple was in complete contrast to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception built in 1790 which was cold, empty and soulless by comparison. The third religion of this town is big and it’s the ashram of Sri Aurobindo and Mother – a French woman who came here in 1920s and shacked up with a guru – became a guru herself and they are now jointly venerated. We queued with our shoes off to see their samadhi, their tombs, venerated as a shrine in the ashram courtyard – it did nothing for us (maybe this was because we didn’t see the “please be silent” notices until we were leaving!). It does obviously mean a lot to a lot of people because there are plenty of those doe eyed westerners around town from the ashram. We haven’t connected. We have however connected with the town – thank you Pi, it was worth it!
