When I arrived in Auroville, I didn't know I was there. I caught a bus from Madras to Pondicherry, thinking that some time on the beach would be good for me after the recent encounter I had with a pair of X chromosomes (as Yoav put it) who ruined me in typical style. I wanted to surf and I was thinking that maybe the full moon would help the waves a little. I arrived at night and strolled down the beach until I saw a light in the doorway near some new-agers doing Yoga in the sand by moonlight. I asked if there were any vacant beachside huts where I could spend the night, and the man at the door answered "hashish?" That's when I knew I was close to the largest hippy communal living experiment on earth.

I had heard that Auroville, a community which began with the best intentions had long since deteriorated into a bunch of hippies smoking weed and playing "redemption song" on the guitar. The community began in the sixties (I think) when westerners were increasingly drawn to the strange spiritual allure of India, not yet recognizing yet another form of dogmatic persuasion and what inevitably just amounts to a power grab by people who claim to know what God is doing or "fools" as Kurt Vonnegut said. Foolishness aside, I was drawn to this place by the fact that I was once an idealist, the intellectual curiosity I have worked to cultivate as a replacement for my apathy, to gain direction and insight, to "train" for the exhausting task of hanging out with hippies all summer with Outward Bound, and because there might be chicks there.

After spending an over-priced night in a hut on the beach, I rented a motorcycle to get me into Auroville, which isn't as easy as one might think. To even skim the surface of this community, one needs to agree to a set of values and complete a series of steps. The first is to be invited in. I was. Next, one has to commit to two weeks of living in one of the communities and working on the organic farm, following the myriad rules which include no outside money, no chemicals of any kind, and a 100 percent Vegan diet. I could do that. No beer, no drugs. I was looking to de-tox anyway, or perhaps just "pre-tox" which is where you get healthy before you go binge drinking. You also have to have read the community charter which sates that "Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness." Not sure about that one.