Meanwhile in Pondicherry it was only 37 today. I took the moped there from Auroville in the morning to have a new pair of glasses made. I had my current pair made there too, 3 years ago. Eye tests seem to be growing more sophisticated all the time.
Running around Pondy on my moped, I discovered a nice book shop, where I bought Amitav Ghosh’s new novel “Gun Island” and two books by Michael Ondaatje. Gun Island is Ghosh’s first novel after his non-fiction book “The Great Derangement” – which was the one I was actually looking for. There he addresses the failure of artists and writers properly to address the Climate Emergency – he says that future generations will be mystified by its absence in the literature of our times. So “Gun Island”, according to reviews, does weave the Climate Emergency into its plot.
Afterwards I had a nice pasta and pineapple juice in an Italian-style restaurant where I was the only customer, and then stopped in at the Ashram to pay my respects to Sri Aurobindo and ‘the Mother’. On the way back, feeling desperate again for something cold, I stopped at Marc’s Cafe in Kuilapalayam, and had some amazing nitro cold-drip coffee, served in a wine glass. Really better than beer. The coffee is grown locally in the Western Ghats and roasted in Auroville.