Closer

It’s Monday morning. Another monsoon day with damp clouds around the house. A little exhausted, yet also excited by the prospects of next month.

Since last Tuesday, we managed with illnesses in the house, complete long days of documentation around the historic St John’s Church and Kangra Fort, hangout with Israeli friends, a beautiful 20km long-1km rise trek to Triund and both permanent and impermanent visitors in the house.

Regarding illnesses, all the interns have managed to get odd sorts of symptoms over the last three weeks, yet we are all fine now. As my diarrhea ended, Veronica got an infection and suffered quite a bit from it, with some late night crappy emergency service in a rural hospital, incompetent laborants in a private clinic and finally relatively good service in a closely private hospital, with some bed-rest and dispatch the same day. Then Jackie got a fever and had some vomiting action, and we still don’t really know why that happened. In any case, we’re all fine now, with bodies that are hopefully more immune than when we got here.

Work is going well, although we are shooting for a moving target. We have completed documents on four old structures, amounting up to 72 pages and lots of pictures and drawings! Good content, yet not much of a synopsis yet. The data is still a little raw. We have two more structures that we have visited, and once they are complete, we will venture into more recent construction materials and designs. It has been interesting to learn reading buildings such as the temples, forts and the church, yet I am ready to look at villages and houses – it would feel more relevant and ‘humane,’ necessitating more interactions with locals.

We are also getting better in coordinating the documentation of the building. Veronica takes up the rigorous engineer task and is like a detective that is trying to solve the question of: Who killed the building? J So she is always looking at tectonic details and cracks… Mihir, our temporary Indian project manager, interacts with local masons, priests, visitors, etc. and tries to get some first-hand information from them. And I think he does, yet sometimes it feels like he’s too lazy to translate it all for us or there is not much to know, maybe.. Jackie does some beautiful quick sketches and takes notes in her book.. I spend about 20 mins just understanding the site, then a considerable amount of time trying to draw a relatively accurate plan and an elevation sketch that always takes longer than I anticipate. I also try to remain connected to the engineering side and discuss some issues with Veronica and Mihir, then we go home and talk and look at the pictures and type for the whole day and feel horrible about being in the Himalayas yet staring at the laptop screen more than anyone else in 200km radius, etc, etc. The story goes on, but in any case– we get it done.

Both Kangra Fort and the Church were great structures. The fort was the largest and most impressive fort I have seen, sitting like a beacon around the steep Himalayan valleys, and had a huge inverted pyramid in it – we never figured out the reason for it. It also had some views that definitely resembled Machu Pichhu (misspelled?). The church was built on an amazing site, very steep in the hills, amidst the Deodar forest. Built by English army in mid-19^th century, it was a nice structure with beautiful roof support elements and buttressing.

Than there is the staff change. Mihir has to leave because his family is moving their house and needs help. A photographer from Delhi, Abishek, came Friday morning and he will replace him for the next month. A younger guy, he seems nice and willing to help – although no background in architecture or engineering. In any case, it was interesting to see someone that was obsessed with pictures so much- I like pictures too but I realized that I could not have been a photographer – he is much more diligent.

Also, he is very comfortable around us from the first second, which has upsides and downsides. Walking around with a bathrobe the first day, asking for the newspaper to read in the toilet, grabbing food or water without asking – altogether another culture shock at minor scale. All is fine now, we got used to it in just a few days.

Saturday was our day off – the first official one! Jackie and Veronica stayed in and went shopping in Mcleodganj (Little Tibet). Mihir, Abishek and I decided to do the famous tourist trek to Triund. A rather long one for people that do not do it weekly. A relatively steep rise, but just very long. 7 hours of high-tempo walking in fog and rain was challenging – but it was worth it. We met a Dutch anthropologist on in Triund and chatted with him for quite a long time, took some nice pictures and had some soup and omelette. Triund is nothing more than a rest house and a small shack that has food, water and sleeping gear. So, first time in Himalayas, I felt like a trekker. Then we got back down to McLeodganj, had some dinner, and chilled with some Israeli friends that we met the other day. Good day.

Visitors from Delhi came Sunday morning – Anshu and his wife, both very easy going and intelligent. Anshu is one of the founders of SEEDS, the NGO we are working with. He has founded SEEDS about ~13 years ago, as an environmental assessment NGO. Yet with all the disasters in India and Southeast Asia, they switched their focus to disaster relief shelter housing. They have helped in many of the earthquakes in India subcontinent, Andaman Islands, etc. They also collaborate a lot with Japanese architects/engineers, which is an interesting connection for me – perhaps I can find myself in that region sometime over the next two years.

We had a nice day with them, as we discussed the strategy for the “Pan-Himalayan” project in small-scale and also over the next five years. We also visited a local German-American architect, Delia, a ~80 year old woman, who impressed all of us very much. Knowledgeable, sincere, friendly, willing to share, and very talented in design. She has built 17 houses in the middle of nowhere out of mud and bamboo, and they might as well be out of Architectural Digest. Background in painting, parents leftist artist intellectuals and also part of the founding team for the Bauhaus tradition. Just amazing. Some ideas that came up in our conversations:

- Nature is not a place to visit, it is our home. Yet if they do not connect to their natural environment, how could people do?

- Development destroys subsistence. Technology makes one more vulnerable, you lose the sense of resistance and survival against hardships.

- Land ownership is travesty. One cannot own nature.

- We need metrics with soul to solve the climate crisis.

- For a good decision, you have to think how it would affect the weakest. (Originally M. Gandhi)

- In cities, you turn your effort to money and the money to things. In the village, you turn your effort to things.

- It is easier to avoid failure than to innovate success.

- Many young people are reluctant to stand on others shoulders. Innovation, though, does not come right away.

- Who says housing should be permanent. We are not permanent, why should the house be. It has to be repairable and easy to maintain instead. Concrete is considered permanent, it is just heavy, hard to repair and has a huge footprint. Bamboo and mud are locally available, natural, beautiful and require just some regular maintenance and a sense of ownership. We should diverge from linear thinking and think cyclically about problems.

- And the best one: “Solutions always lie within the local environment.” This one sounds simple, yet it has a lot of implications regarding sustainability. Attempts to simplify problems and solve them altogether does not work, small effective local action coupled with good global connectivity is much more powerful.

Anyway, the point is, this lady was a great person to find out about, and we will definitely spend long hours with her in the next month, just listening…