the first country i travelled to outside of new zealand and australia was india; i was 20 years old, living in sydney and trying to save money to go to europe when louise said to me, “i’m going to india, do you want to come too?”. i immediately said yes. we arrived in bombay on january 1st 1987, but my backpack stayed on the plane and went to london; all i had was a plastic bag containing my passport, travellers cheques, camera, diary, hairbrush and a duty-free bottle of whisky. it was a memorable beginning to three incredible life-changing months during which time we travelled from bombay to kovalam to kashmir and nepal, and many places in between (my backpack did turn up 4 days later, unscathed by its solo adventure …). since then i’ve talked many times about coming back, but somehow i never have – until now.

this time i’m in pondicherry, where i’ve been participating in Tantidhatri – a festival of women’s performance that is part of the magdalena project network. the festival has just finished – an intense 5 days of performances, from traditional indian performances to my own cyberformance make-shift and several of the magdalena “regulars” – and now i have treated myself to a week to rest, recover, and discover pondicherry. as part of the festival we have seen a little bit, including the sri aurobindo ashram and nearby auroville, an experimental international city. i need to go back there to get a bit more of an understanding of how it all works, but we festival artists had a special invitation to the matrimandir, and i was performing make-shift from a house in auroville, so that has given me some insight. some of us visited mahabalipurum on the way down from chennai, and after the festival those who were still here went south to the enormous chidambaram temple and on to a dawn festival as the beginning of an ecotourism development on an island that was ravaged in the 2004 tsunami.

i have so much to write about, hopefully there will be some time during this restful week to reflect on my second visit to india; but at the moment i’m just enjoying the colourful, noisy, chaotic, yet harmonious existence of this over-crowded larger-than-life country. and today i was blessed by lakshmi, a temple elephant who accepts donations of coins, notes and food with her trunk and carefully passes the money to her assistant before eating the food.