hi everyone, from Auroville (http://auroville.org).

Been here for a few days after overnight trains and buses. Trains are quite enjoyable. Buses much less; but sometimes faster.

Auroville is close to Pondicherry, south of Chennai/Madras. It's a newly created city, with a kind of supranational status, but in india, maybe 40 yrs old, meant to be open to all creeds and interests, and to be an experiment with alternative living. It's a success in some ways: for existing and growing to 2000ppl or so, and for being very green and integrating with the villages that used to live in a kind of dire desert before that. It's a question mark yet as for being an ideal place, and supporting ideal people or politics or ... it's a very human place, that looks at times like a vacation town but dealing with quite difficult conditions (clime and environment, growth issues, support and relation with various levels of institutions in india, etc).
Definitely interesting though not a place that opens up immediately; if only because it's formed of many communities with various tendencies and approaches to living (from most experimental vegan/fully sustainable to luxury villas).

I'm looking for some volunteer opportunities, I hope it will help meet more locals. It's a place that's at the same time out of the "mainstream" like Toronto life, and also very cosmopolitan because of the many highly educated people from all over the world that live here. But mostly it's still human, all too human, not quite an arcology populated by levitating sages. And perhaps that's the most promising aspect today: that it goes on attracting and holding together people of all persuasions.
More will come as I go beyond first impressions.