SARVODAYA ASHRAM
When I visit the Sarvodaya Ashram I try to be as little of a burden as I can. Aside from being picked up at Palanpur, an hour away, at 6 in the morning by Meet I have fit into the rhythms of the Ashram. When someone goes to a village I go along but there is no program for me on my own. Tea is provided to everyone at 7 in the morning, sweet milky tea with a thin round kakra and a thick round bakra, two kinds of bread. Then at 8:30 or 9:30 we all have breakfast together prepared by Praveen, the cook, who also cooks with help for the 150 students. Then lunch is at 1:30 or 2:30, another round of tea with kakra at 5 and finally dinner at 8:30. If nothing else is happening and Hasmukh and Shilpa are busy, I spend most of the day in my room. But when visitors come to the Ashram and a program is arranged for them I tag along and photograph whatever is happening.
So Sunday was a free day and I took some spatial videos and photographs of the Ashram and sat in my room and wrote and worked on photographs until the evening when some distinguished Gandhian sisters who run a Gandhian ashram in the Himalayas arrived. I went to the goshala, cow stalls with them.
Apparently having a goshala is an important part of each Gandhian institution. The reverence for the cow is not just demonstrated by cows wandering freely in city streets, which seems odd to Westerners who see cows as domesticated animals, providers of meat and milk, but by actual reverence for the presence of cows, a devotion to cows who also provide milk and dahi (yogurt) and particularly clarified butter (ghee) but never meat.
Children lined up to go to eat
https://share.icloud.com/photos/026LzS9XZwH78o5tOYDtDy82A
Tour of Ashram
https://share.icloud.com/photos/054UwsVPzsJSzehelAraaah3Q
Ashram building
https://share.icloud.com/photos/099fIq2xGurgnrB1dU–Dbu1A
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 