The last few days have been consumed largely by preparations for departure.  Peter’s house in Auroville is small and he hasn’t accumulated very much stuff by Western standards, but stuff is stuff!  It has still required hours and days of sorting, deciding what to keep and what to do with what we don’t want to keep. 

A few days ago, this process afforded me a “real Indian” experience: Peter had decided to donate a lot of computer cables and parts to a friend of his in Auroville who fixes and maintains computers.  Like Peter, Charlie lives in the “green belt” which is meant to ring the “city center” of Auroville (The Mother, who founded Auroville, intended it to be a city of 50,000, surrounded by a more sparsely populated green belt.  However, at this time the community number only about 2,000, and there are all kinds of obstacles to the kind of planning that would make it more possible to carry out extensive further development.  For more on the vision as well as the current reality of Auroville, check out their website at http://www.auroville.org).  However, Charlie’s place is on the other side of Auroville, several kilometers away by the winding, rutted red dirt roads that traverse the community.   How to get the stuff there?  Peter packed it all into a 15 gallon plastic garbage pail, and we decided to carry it on the motorcycle.  So I sat on the back of the bike with the garbage can, which probably weighed thirty five pounds, balanced on (o.k., digging into) my right thigh, my right arm over the top of it and holding the metal handle on the other side.   It’s no mean feat to keep a bike loaded thusly upright in sand or mud, and there were plenty of both on the way to Charlie’s.  But we succeeded.

Of course, this was a very minor triumph by local standards.  Tamils routinely carry amazing loads on their motorcycles: huge logs, 25 gallon jugs of water, a wife and two or three kids, big piles of firewood.  Peter reports that once he saw a man, his wife, three kids and three goats all piled onto a moped.  Mind you, all this traffic moves over roads where goats, cows, bullock carts loaded meters high and wide with straw, and pedestrians compete with motor vehicles for the limited space, where I have never seen a stop sign, where driving on the left seems to be a suggestion rather than a rule, and where only Westerners signal their intent to turn in any way.

Even the Westerners here transport their babies and kids on motorcycles and bicycles.  Nobody wears helmets, and there is, as far as I know, no such thing as a child seat for a motorcycle.  Can you imagine riding a motorcycle down the road in Vermont, with no helmet on and your child on the seat in front of you?  Can you imagine how horribly negligent you would appear? 

The American obsession with “safety” and “health” stands out in sharp relief here.  Back in Hampi, Horst remarked on the way Americans were willing to endanger their balance for climbing on the rocks by carrying big jugs of water everywhere they went, while Europeans generally prefer to drink before and after walks and travel light.  One enters most of the restaurants here barefoot, and cats and dogs stroll through, begging for scraps.  A restaurant that allowed bare feet at home wouldn’t stay open for a week before someone called the Board of Health. 

We Americans obsess about drinking water all the time—and in the process, we’ve created a nightmare industry that is endangering fresh water supplies all over the world and creating mountains of plastic waste.  Furthermore, the plastic we use to supply bottled water leaches carcinogenic compounds that end up in our bloodstreams, our fat, and our breast milk.  We obsess about hydrating while we compulsively overeat.  We forbid bare feet in restaurants and grocery stores because of our concerns about food safety—but we hire only a symbolic number of inspectors to police the food industry and we sanction industrial farming and slaughtering practices that guarantee that infants and old people will die of food poisoning every year.

As Peter and I get ready to leave for the airport later today, I can’t help but think about all the “security” measures put in place since 9/11.  Like the rules against bare feet in restaurants, these seem to me largely symbolic.  Does anyone really believe that terrorist attacks will be prevented by confiscating toothpaste from people’s carry-on luggage?  I guess someone must.  But I see these measures as designed a) to remind us to be afraid, b) to convince us that only big daddy government can protect us and c) to teach us to be docile in the face of authoritarian control.

Alarming as the growing level of authoritarianism in the U.S. is, there is an even deeper menace concealed in all these measures allegedly aimed at “public health” and “safety.”  The menace is that we begin to believe that we actually have control over our “safety,” and ultimately over life and death.  We begin to imagine that injury and death are fundamentally “preventable” and feel justified in being enraged when they happen to us or someone we love.  Not only that, but we feel justified in looking for someone or something to blame when things go wrong.  We tend to believe that we deserve restitution when life deals us a hard blow.  While our attempts to regulate “health” and “safety” are intended to prevent suffering, we remain blind to the underlying attitudes that our actions feed, and to the suffering those attitudes themselves create.  Most of us also fail to notice, let alone value, the spontaneity and freedom we sacrifice in our attempts to control outcomes.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe in taking care of things and people.  When I owned a motorcycle, I never rode without a helmet, boots, and long heavy pants (no shorts and sandals for me).  These days, I never ride my bicycle without a helmet, and I feel naked in my car if I don’t have my seat belt on!  There is something strangely unbalanced about the Indian approach to these issues, too.  For instance, the general attitude here seems to be, why worry about traffic safety, it’s all in the hands of the Divine.  But when something goes wrong, people are quite ready to take retribution into their own hands, forgetting all about the supposed sovereignty of the Divine.  A friend who lived in Bangalore for a number of years told us that while he was there, a bus driver accidentally hit and killed a pedestrian.  A mob gathered and stopped the bus, pulled the driver out, and beat him to death.  Afterward they set the bus on fire, and vandalized thirty other city buses for good measure. 

So I’m not suggesting that Indians have it “right” and we have it “wrong.”   Rather, I am arguing for a Feldenkrais approach to public life.  I am suggesting that we practice remembering that, in collective as well as individual life, our intentions and actions do not always mesh, and that successive approximations are necessary in order to bring them into greater alignment.  I am suggesting that we try to remember that even the most apparently benign habit comes with constraints and that there may be alternatives that promote greater freedom, creativity, and joy.