CMC - Day Eleven

The closest i got to a warm flaky croissant this weekend was a warm flaky baguette and i savoured every bite of it. Along side was a cappucino with a happy face of white frothy cream on a background of chocolate powder. I wish i could say that the happy face was due to the French influence but i don't think the French would go for such outward displays of frivolity. A pout maybe (eh Vincent?). Pondicherry itself is a relatively clean, relatively green Indian city with broad, tree-lined streets layed out in a grid. The signs read in French and Tamil and the names of the streets are often a mixture of the two: Rue Nandhiyavattan, for example. The Indian gendarmes guide traffic and guard the governer's mansion in white pressed uniforms and funny multicoloured hats. Children and adults play in large green park. Pondy, as it's known, is a pleasant city to which i could imagine returning.

My guesthouse for the weekend was in the beachside community of Auro Beach, 6km north of Pondicherry, and part of the large international planned community of Auroville. This community of some 1700 people from over 35 countries is the vision of "The Mother," a now-deceased French female guru and disciple of Sri Aurobindo, a French educated Indian who returned to his native Pondicherry in the early 20th century with a vision of transforming first India, and later, all of humanity. The Charter of Auroville, signed on the 28th of February, 1968, read as follows:

1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
2. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
3. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards futue realisations.
4. Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.

The Mother dreamed of "somewhere on earth a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of goodwill who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme truth; a place of peace, concord and harmony wher all the fighting instinces of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weaknesses and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the search for pleasure and material enjoyment." She wrote much more about this dream and from it sprang a community which occupies a few thousand acres of land that radiates outward in the shape of a spiralling galaxy from a large golden meditation dome, the matrimandir, into four zones: International, Cultural, Residential and Industrial. The once red-earthed and barren platuea is now covered with dry tropical forests, agricultural projects, futuristic concrete buildings and good intentions. Its residents are engaged in "a wide variety of activities, including research into a cashless economy, environmental regeneration, organic farming, renewable energy, appropriate building technology, village development, handicrafts and small-scale industries, health care, education, cross-cultural communication and many other fields."

Reading the postings board at the information center one finds any number of classes pertaining to health and well-being, including all varieties of alternative healing modalities, many of which i'd never heard of. As an example, one gentleman teaches Watsu, shiatsu massage in the water. Some aurovillians, as they are called, are engaged in the cultivation of traditional Indian medicinal plants in order to reeducate the surrounding villagers about traditional remedies that have for the most part been lost to them. It was the occasion of several local healers coming together to explain their work that prompted me to extend my visit to Auroville by one day. Informed of this gathering by a young American now working at Martavum, or "healing forest", i found myself sitting around a large, rectangular slate table with six Canadian nurses, two german Aurovillians, three traditional healers (two women and one man) and Shivaraj, the enthusiastic coordinator of this enterprise. The Canadian nurses were traveling together through India for four weeks, two of which were spent in Auroville running workshops on "healing touch" and women empowerment. They seemed to view their trip as a great success and they seemed flush with excitement about the possibility of learning something from the locals in return. We sipped sweet, milky coffee and asked questions of the healers.

A word, first, about this "forest." Hans, the American, explained that this garden was in its infancy. Unlike the rather well developed Pichandikulum, on the other side of Auroville, the medicinal plants here were still awaiting the growth of the large trees that would provide necessary shade for their optimal growth. The signs to explain their utility were also in a stage of early development and did not yet say anything about the utility of the shrubs and trees they identified. The names, themselves, flowered with possibility: Calotropis Proceria, Pongumia Pinnata, Plumeria Rubra, Gauzuma Ulmifolia, Ervatemia Divancata, Helicteres Isora, Cassia Alata, Ficus Religiosa, Vetiveria Zizanoides, Catharanthus Roseus, Dodnea Viscosa, Acorus Calamus, Gymanaea Sylvestre, Garcinia Spicata. How different these lovely names to those of the pharmacueticals we must learn in the course of medical education?

Sagundala was a women in her 50s who at the age of 27 had a feeling that she could heal people. She makes special use of the Neem (Azadirachta indica, cousin of Mahogany) leaf and, while channeling Mahakali, the great and powerful Indian goddess (wife of Shiva), prays and fans the burning neem leaves. What occurs is a form of "aura cleansing" and she uses it to cure fever, body aches and general malaise. What other purposes it serves were lost in translation from this stout, confident Indian villager. She brought along the white and red powder seen on so many Indian foreheads and blessed us each with a dot between our eyes. I saw her take the hands of one of the German women and reduce the latter to tears as she closed her eyes and prayed, swaying back and forth. I asked about the purpose of Neem oil, which I knew had been blown up the nose of a child, causing a chemical pneumonitis (inflammation of the lungs) that led him to the CMC pediatrics ward. I was told that it is most often diluted in water and used to heal skin lesions and their associated pain. The male of the group suggested that sleeping under the Neem tree in the daytime led a general improvement in health. We learned that 2 teaspoons of ground papaya seeds daily prevents/cures parasites, that sesame oil in the naval also cures parasites, and that conch shells are added to ghee (clarified butter), fired, dried, powdered and dissolved in hot water to stop post-partum bleeding. The flower of Cassia Auriculata is boiled into a tea to cure Diabetes. Melivacaea is smashes, filtered and given in two teaspoons to relieve period pains. While i suspect that these traditional healers would have a cure for most ailments, we learned that the most common complaints among Indian villagers are "stomach problems, headache and colds." With the exception of parasites, theirs sounds a lot like those common problems found in any American clinic.

Today i visited Pichandikulum, another forest of traditional medical plants in a far more developed state, to see what else i could learn, and to see how Martavum might someday look. Here, red dirt pathways wound through a maze of trees, shrubs, little ponds; signs clearly displayed the names and uses for well over a hundred of the 400 or so medicinal plants used at one time or another by traditional Indian healers. I found Curculigo Orchioides, which "cures diabetes, heat diseases, leucoderma, eye pain and strenghtens the body and cures poliomyelitis if administered together with appropriate formulations." The roots of Baliospermum Montanum cure "scanty urination"; the leaves cure asthma; the oil relieves joint pain. Spathoda Companulata bark is used in a concoction to treat dysentary, renal and gastrointestinal problems while the leave is infused to treat urethral inflammations. My curiosity about how they discovered these uses led me to consider how the many drugs we use in allopathic medicine were "discovered". Many of them, no doubt, were derived from plants such as these, used as they are/were by traditional healers.

It is tempting to be skeptical of these various shrubs with their various healing properties. After all, few if any have been subjected to the rigorous system of trials that we use to create the evidence base upon which we practice medicine. And yet, i like to keep an open mind. After all, these remedies have been used for hundreds if not thousands of years. As has Ayurvedic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, Accupuncture, massage. Allopathic medicine and its pharmacopia are relatively new. The aurovillians, in particular, made sure that i understood that and they seemed to size me up with a certain suspicion. What could i, a western medical student, want to know about this stuff? Surely i wouldn't understand that herbal remedies, barks and flowers, energy and prayer could heal. Ironically, their skepticism of my open mind revealed something more about how closed their own minds seemed to be.

I was forced to defend allopathic medicine many times over the weekend to those that had great confidence in any number of alternative therapies but none in those that i will someday soon have to offer. It was as if, ironically, the type of science upon which my education is based was not welcome there, too much a part of the status quo to have any status in an alternative world. I think all this fighting about who is right and who is wrong when it comes to healing is silly and potentially harmful. It is a clash of egos that benefits least he or she who needs healing. Shouldn't we learn to cater a treatment to the individual rather than an individual to the treatment? Can't we all just get along?

I left Auroville this afternoon and returned to Vellore. I'm happy to be back. While some of the work that is taking place there is encouraging, I was overall discomfited by this aspiring utopia, its aura of neocolonialism and strange inhospitability. I am disappointed because i felt like my open mind has been stepped on - how many times have i been told not to open one's mind so much that it falls out. As I rode my bike through the dusty lanes of Auroville the afternoon, a thought recurred in my mind, a salve to my wounded idealism: It's okay to have one's head in the clouds, as long as one's feet are firmly planted on the ground and one's hands are meaningfully occupied somewhere in between. I'm looking forward to going back to work tomorrow.

Hope you all had a nice monday.

justin

ps. i have so many thoughts about this weekend and my short time in Auroville, i've found it difficult to focus this evening. I'll attribute it in part to long and jarring bus ride. Hell hath no fury like an Indian country road.

pps. The literal definition of "utopia" is "no place."