Apeetha Arunagiri, the ecologist from Australia who has been a pioneer in the Annamalai hills, arrives to speak with me. We are in Tiruvannamalai, the sacred heart of ritual practice for Hindus for millennia. It is October, and the days are heading towards the euphoria of festival time, as the Durga puja takes place in the various ritual shrines and sanctuaries of the town. She asks me: ‘Do you know what is bio dynamics? It follows from the work of Rudolf Steiner. There are lots of people here who use his method. They use a combination of various things, and fill a cowhorn with it, and then bury it in the earth for six months. After it matures, it can be mixed with earth, its marvellous.’

‘How can one cowhorn of manure work?’

‘You know how homeopathy works. It works like that.’

Organic farming is the buzz-word in Tiruvannamalai. Apeetha tells me that if she applies for a loan for organic farming she would get it immediately. ‘It’s ridiculous! I am a tree planter, a forester, not an organic farmer.’

‘You could combine the methods. Why not? Get the farmers to get involved in forestry and forest produce,’ I tell her placatingly.

We are waiting for Illyarajah, the musician. Apeetha says he promised her money for a truck six years ago. He arrives. He’s a short-statured man with huge eyes, India’s best-known Tamil composer, along with Rahman. His lyrics dominate the film industry.

‘You can help us,’ Apeetha says. ‘You have the means, and also influence over people.’

‘Come out with it! What do you want from me?’ he says to us.

‘To be visible in our movement, to use your influence,’ the Australian who has inhabited the Annamalai hill where Ramanasram is located, says in her quiet way.

‘What do you want?’ he says again, wishing to go back to his meditations.

‘She wants thirty thousand rupees to buy a van to transport the saplings,’ I speak now, to quell his impatience.

Illayarajah says he will speak to the ashram president about it, and both of us are immediately grateful. It is not easy for Apeetha, who is identified with successful reforestation practices. The daily struggles are immense – she ropes in housewives, school children, salaried workers, anyone at all. Wherever there is someone to help in the project, that person becomes her friend. She feels panic about venality, corruption, paedophilia which surfaces in pilgrim towns. Yet she says that people in India are basically happy – nothing works, but so what? Even babies have the full moon, she says, laughing.

 

We walk to a pretty rooftop cafe. The owner helps her network with local groups and tourists over the question of forestation. She seems to know a lot of the pilgrims who are from abroad and do not think of themselves as tourists. In the cafes in Thiru, for one dollar, in a pretty ethnic surrounding, with busy streets spilling themselves into view, a cup of tea or coffee can last several hours. The foreigners who come here are all spiritually inclined, dressed for the tropics, and the children with them healthy, book reading, bicycling, alert. They come to India in search of happiness, and seem to find it. It seems a picture postcard world, but Apeetha is willing to tell me about it. She speaks of the underbelly of it, the man who been abused in childhood, and could well become an abuser himself. Out of victimhood and affliction rises the circumstances of similar predatoriness. She says, ‘Pilgrim spaces attract the baddies as much as it attracts the good guys.’ When I ask the policewomen about it, they shrug and say that they have routine problems. Whatever happens in the world happens here too, and they handle it ‘routinely’.

 

There is so much of Tamilnadu that I still need to understand. One of my friends from the ashram arrives with her baby who was adopted under the scheme that Jayalalitha started in villages where female foeticide was practised. One of the interesting things about Tiruvannamalai is the sense of hope along with the potentialities for pathology. We sit and talk for an hour, since I have been trying this past year (2009) to look at regenerative communities in temple towns. She and her husband run a school with friends called Tiruvannamalai Learning Centre, which is in the process of being registered. It is an experimental school. They now have twenty children attending the school at various levels. There are seven in the nursery and the rest working with alphabets, concepts of time, and simple sums. Two older children get personal attention separately since they are ten and twelve years old.

I visit the school, travelling in the school van. The children are comfortably excited; the shy ones are being nestled by Purnima and the school helpers. There are European children among the Tamils, all singing songs, tiny yet confident. Some of the working class children are sponsored by the parents of the other children. Tiruvannamalai Learning Centre is five kilometres from the town on the girivalam or circumambulation path. It is in the middle of land still being cultivated. If the experiment continues to be successful, then more of the local children will be sponsored. TLC, while waiting for official clearance, is developing a website.

 

The teachers start the day with warm-up exercises, and then, when the children have loosened their limbs, they fan out into the surrounding gardens to clean, sweep and water the plants. The tiniest one then go on a nature walk while the older children begin to study. There are fixed times for everything, and even the very small children feel a sense of security in routine. On the walk, they learn the names of insects, plants, crops in the fields. While earlier they were diffident about mixing with each other, the local children and the spiritualist’s children, they now feel completely at ease with one another. The teachers have worked elsewhere before, some with Krishnamurthy and Olcott schools, some with Montessori schools in U.K. or in Africa, and one of them has worked with challenged or special children in U.K. She brings with her a sense of laughter and practical skills.

My friend, who taught at Olcott, and whose in-laws come from Devaraja Mudaliar’s family (he was the authorised biographer of Ramana Maharshi) says that the cooperative teaching with European and Indian children is particularly interesting because questions of class, race, religion, language, caste are all bypassed. It is interesting that in this small town in South India, people can think of new ways of dealing with ecological issues of education and livelihood as part of everyday communitarian practice.