resilience, big time

It has been a while since my last blog entry, and I am, once again, overwhelmed about how to capture everything in a few paragraphs. But I think this time, the unifying topic of my experiences will be resilience.
I am certainly becoming more acclimatized to this wholly inimitable environment, and ultimately, becoming more resilient in every sense. I started enjoying the arctic temperature of the fountain water, which we use to wash dishes, the house and ourselves. Well, about that – water has been cut for four days straight from the village we stay in, and even the fountain ran out of water, so we had to commute to fill water in twentysomething water bottles we had. Yet, this first-time experience with water scarcity made me appreciate the value of a good infrastructure much more than any paper that I could read about urban sustainability.
My stomach has also gained some resilience after the diarrhea; I have straining my taste buds in the last week with Tibetan "momos," pineapple-flavored yoghurt drinks, heavy Moghul dishes in clay pots and weird Indian tastes with gravy in every imaginable color – basically copious amounts of mystery food wherever we go. Again, from an initially unpleasant encounter, the ritual of eating is gradually becoming an exhilarating spectacle.
Patience… That’s another notion to dwell on in India. Time exists, yet it does not seem to matter too much. Beyond the idiosyncratic laziness of the countryside, people here just seem to take any hardship with incredible patience – monsoon comes, life stops, and that’s absolutely fine. We run out of gas, and nobody shows even a hint of anxiety about the plans for the rest of the day.
Monsoon has not hit us as much as we were afraid of so far. Miraculously, we never found ourselves under the "tears of God," as the book that I borrowed from a local monk describes it. I think it would be fun at least to experience the rain for once. Perhaps as we take one of the challenging treks such as the one to Triund (~2800m), a monsoon can hit us once and all. One upside of it is the views as the clouds move away – nothing looks as crisp around here as the 10 minutes after the rain.
One short digression about India as a country: Although we are quite remote in the mountains, one can get a very good sense about the state of the nation just by observing the locals, interacting with the English-speaking minority and reading the local newspaper. Poverty is heart-wrenching, yet everyone is optimistic about "making it big one day." People are not altruistic in any sense, so the only way for a country with 45% under the global poverty line will be to expand the pie rather than trying to re-distribute it. Everyone seems committed to gain status – as the most recent book I am reading, "Being Indian", describes it, power and status set the meaning of typical Indian’s lives. It is not money as much as respect that everyone tries to gain. The historical caste system is still relevant, and business cards and diplomas accompany one’s identity wherever they go. When I meet a new person, the first encounter is about my country, my school, my future profession, and even the status of my family in Turkey. And whom I know that can be a good contact if we carry on the conversation. I understand that in the globalized world, these titles do matter, yet Indian interest in trappings of power are certainly a little odd. It is also interesting, and very much similar to Turkey, that an a priori superiority is assumed when Indians meet a foreigner – even more towards guys as it is a very patriarchal community.
About work… It has been picking up; we have completed the survey of three buildings so far. Baijnath Temple, Masrur Rock Cut Temple and Kotla Fort. It is quite an experience to be out on the field through the day, and spend hours looking at the design of these old constructions. It is amazing to think that a tourist may think that an hour is more than enough, whereas with the lens of the architect/engineer, they become overwhelming open air laboratories.
In such ancient structures, function seems to be determined in boldly different ways: these old edifices integrated religious iconography with socio-cultural significance, the local microclimate with architectural precedence. Unique earthquake resistant features are to be found, like through-stones, buttresses, bracings and overall symmetric massing, yet they all were damaged ‘big-time’ in the 7.8 magnitude 1905 Kangra Earthquake (quite comparable in damage and human losses to 1999 Earthquake in Izmit, Turkey).
We are in a good pace despite everything: two comprehensive reports have been completed on the first two structures, amounting to fourty pages! I am actually satisfied with our methodology – we were able to come up with a unique documentation structure that is a bit more than "Rapid Visual Screening," yet also more informative. We broke it down to architecture and structure, and they further ‘bifurcate’ (Mihir’s favorite word) to site, massing, climate, structural system, details, repairs and a short synopsis at the end.
Moreover, considering that this is a preliminary proof-of-concept study for a future Pan-Himalayan Survey on all the significant buildings, we should err on the side of systematic comprehensiveness rather than conciseness and efficiency.
Yet, sometimes I also think that we should start focusing on the vernacular housing and public structures rather soon. Although very interesting as a warm-up stage, these ancient structures seem to be limited in their construction material and technique. Hopefully, we will diversify our portfolio with timber, adobe and reinforced concrete buildings in the coming weeks, which would provide good insights on tradeoffs of different construction materials, along with other sustainability factors such as local availability, life-cycle assessment and cost.
The team is working in synch as well – we complement each other. Veronica is the hardcore engineer & "crack detector," very astute in her observations on anything technical. She claims to have no command on anything artsy/architect-y, yet this sounds more like self-conditioning. Jackie, on the other hand, is the mellow-subtle true architect- loves to sketch in her moleskine, and is very good at it. Mihir, the SEEDS coordinator on site with us, is also very helpful with his site experience on earthquake engineering – and also links us to the local knowledge as he is the only Hindi speaker on site. Me, on the other hand, work as the link between the disciplines, which I enjoy. I work on all the visuals for the documents, edit the pictures, do some diagrams in Photoshop and all the other meticulous stuff about the layout.
Well, then there is our new driver, "Happy" - that is his name. So we joke with him using all the English expressions that contain ‘happy,’ it turns out there are a lot of them. He is a very cheerful local guy, a good driver, and accompanies us kindly wherever we go. He might even invite us to a local wedding, which Lauren described as ‘not-to-be-missed’ at Stanford before we left…
I wish there was a little less ambiguity about the coming weeks, though. Mihir keeps talking about planning the schedule, but things just get postponed quite leisurely – both in a good and bad way. Having no stress at work makes me a little stressed, for some sad reason. Hopefully, today, we’ll get a Gantt Chart together, with the anticipation of finishing on August 23 and travelling for ~10 days afterwards.
Finally, some other moments to remember:
Hiking up to the Monk’s Temple up in the hill for the second time, sipping chai, seeing all the devoted visitors go through odd rituals that involve eating white crispy chips, sipping water from a copper cup, putting ash on the forehead and kissing the ground three times (I feel bad for not memorizing the Hindi name for these items). Then listening to Indian journalist/singer jam with a local guy and the monk in melodies unheard of.
Again, hiking up in McLeodGanj for the sunset with Mihir and Happy, sipping apple cider overlooking Kangra valley.
Meeting a typical Tibetan refugee, Dawa, who silently sat on our table as we were working in a café and remained silent unless we asked him some questions. And then going to Hotel Tibet to east some Tibetan food and kind of being scammed by the waiter who suggested us the worst selections on the menu and then teased us with some great food, and after a few bites we had, he realized that it was the wrong table, so then took the food away and brought it to the other table – quite a spectacle.
Being in wilderness in Kotla Fort, a truly off-the-beaten-path site – no internet information could be found on its history. Ancient rocks, monkeys, huge insects, moist waterbeds, all to be capped by a collective sunstroke for the team. Then we healed.
Mihir’s comment: "People around here in Mcleodganj seem lost. They have no expression on their face."
Veronica: "I was just trying to give some construction criticism."
Local Musician talking to me I at the monk’s temple courtyard:
-Are you here big time?
- ?
- Do you like music big time?
- ?!
- Big time.
- I see.