My interest in people leads me to a love of reading about them, because good literature is a study of human nature and of perseverance within the human condition. I like works like The General in His Labyrinth, Love at the Time of Cholera and Memories of my Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez; or Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being; or Kenzaburo Oe’s narratives, A Personal Matter and Nip the Bud; Shoot the Kids. These are profound as they drag one into new worlds, new situations, sentiments and nuances. Through their characters we find ourselves dealing with their world. Through our curiosity we evolve a worldview.
Friendship becomes a kind of mutual exploration of values, patterns of thought and structure of behavior.
I also like the study of economics and behavioral sciences, because they speak of collective human aspirations and action; of how larger groups of people organize themselves and their behavior for the common good or even self-destruction. Literature and the behavioral sciences often deal with collective amnesia regarding the huge failures of the human race, and the horrid stereotypes we cast on groups in order to ignore and suppress them. If I pick up The Economist I first look in the back to read their page long obituaries. I learn about such fantastic lives, times, struggles, achievements and failures. I always finish the article thinking ‘I wish I had known that person.’
Reading about people leads one to writing about them. I yearn to be a writer and that would logically be another of my hobbies, time permitting. My short story Akhada appeared in Femina, which made me happy. Akhada is about a Nepali woman who mistakenly wanders into the all-male world of a traditional gymnastics ground, hidden within a deep overgrown forest. It is an encounter between the fragile personas of the immodest male ego and protected female pride. It explores societal boundaries and limits, which are things I do not like. I have written a novel over the past ten years just for the fun of it, not to publish it. It is called Samsara and deals with the evolution of a woman’s soul and her self-discovery, against great odds in a traditional patriarchal society.
Writing is an opportunity for me to explore the relations between the central, controlling mainstream of society, and its less defined creative edges. It allows me to analyze things strange, queer, transforming, and unusual and perhaps to discover the unknown. Art lies out there on the unfettered periphery of the mainstream. The core in metropolitan centers appears stagnant and polluted, the more so as one approaches the Eurocentric universe.
The literary journal Biblio gave me the opportunity to publish many of my ideas, including a review of Kenzaburo Oe’s literature when he won the Nobel Prize, and an analysis called Queer Words that reviewed the rich history of gay and lesbian literature in India. Vikram Seth, Bupen Khakkar, R. Raj Rao and many others have contributed to this very Indian tradition, allowing multiple images of normal, yet ‘different’, existences to emerge, unlike the cutting-edge West that has stereotyped gay life into a stale pop culture. Again everything becomes Disney World, an amusement, a stereotype and a trap. By exploring the ‘edge’ one gets back to the potentials of the center. India offers its people a huge variety of personal identities and paths in life. Our culture in India is not uniform, but what Milan Kundera calls a ‘pluraform’. What we wear and build is expression coming from many pluraforms deep inside pushing up and out, while the global culture of ‘the center’ is a uniform pushing in onto people, smothering their unique identity and sense of individuality.
Such playing about with ideas about people leads to critical analysis and proposals, and new models and paths for looking at the human condition. In The Science of the Absurd, a critical review I wrote of Ruth Vanita’s translation of Chocolate by Pandeya Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’, I could employ her wonderful introductory essay to explore ‘common wisdom’, stereotypes, prejudices and biases to explain how empiricism and science have been perverted to the misplaced cause of suppressing and marginalizing minorities. Medicine, law, the family construct, advertising, religion, politics, education and other ‘institutions’ are more often used to ply untruths about minorities than truths. We started the twentieth century with erroneous ideas about women, blacks and Jews, and we ended it with erroneous views of Muslims, gays and Africa. Through reading and writing one can climb up the tree trunk of life and walk out to the ends of life’s branches and twigs, exploring worlds and realities hidden from the average mind. Young architects, go out there on the fringe and explore yourselves.
People, reading and writing and a little daring leads to my most favorite hobby: being a traveler. A tourist is not a traveler. A traveler has no plan, no bookings, no train reservations and no guides. A traveler moves on instinct and according to intuition in a general direction toward a vague destination. Fate and turns of events shape their paths. The movement and journey is their search. The people met and encountered, the incidents and the experiences are the goal. When I first visited Bhutan in the late 1970s I was the only Caucasian in Thimphu and maybe one of five or six in the Kingdom. I was able to traverse the entire mountainous country over dirt roads and mule tracts. I slept under vast skies filled with a blanket of glittering stars. I fell in love with the land and with the people. Its culture, for me, has been a deep well of learning and a source of wisdom and mental peace. The greatest honor in my life was being commissioned to design their new Capitol Complex, within the Capital City Plan I prepared. In this work I am dealing with the most sacred artifacts and icons of Bhutanese culture. I am overwhelmed by this. It is a continuation of a search that began in the Himalayas many decades ago. So, to be commissioned to design a new building is like embarking on a new adventure. It is setting off on a search for the real and the true. A good architect must be a good traveler, at least in his mind.
Another expedition, referred to in an earlier letter, was my travel overland from London to Mumbai in 1971. I had no itinerary or clear idea of how I would do it. I learned survival along the way and took the help, protection and shelter of pure strangers. This adventure was my education about the greatness of humanity and our common values and concerns. It was my rite of passage from a boy to a man. I flew from Boston to London and took a train down to Dover, then the Channel ferry across to France. From there it was mostly overland: trains, buses, walking at times, camels, vans and hitch-hiking. I just traveled from one city to the next and made friendships along the way. All I knew was that I was moving toward India and that I must ‘move’ and I must ‘survive’. I came to love the Turkish, Kurdish, Iranian, Afghan and sub-continental peoples. They are at once earthy and erudite. They are steeped in great cultures fostering a love for humanity; a will to persist and to survive. These are the people from whom the West can learn a great deal, but there has to be humility and submission to learn anything from anyone.
To travel like this you have to put your fate totally in the hands of others – unknown others! You are not a tourist; you are traveling in totally unknown territory. You need a basic faith in human nature. You have to see the good in each person, respect that good, and you will get respect in return. Concerns about water, food, shelter and physical security then vanish. All those flow toward you as part of the relationships you build along life’s way. My love for and friendships with these people are born of moving with them, eating with them, sharing a few drops of water from a desert well, sleeping under the stars at night, and always laughter. India has always been the destination of my explorations and travels.
On my first visit to India I flew with stops in Alaska, Japan, China, Taiwan, Cambodia and Thailand. When I landed in Phnom Penh I was told I could not enter because there were no diplomatic relations between America and Cambodia. By the time the argument was over the plane had deserted me in the small airport and they had no choice but to allow me to stay. Adversaries became friends. The one or two taxis had left the airstrip and the soldiers got me a ride on an elephant up to the edge of town, from where I took a cycle rickshaw at dusk into the
strange city with red dust roads. They were of a grand scale, lined with white stones and swept neatly into order every morning. I spent ten days in the country and was the only American who was not in jail. There were fourteen imprisoned US Air Force pilots, who had been shot down for illegally intruding into Cambodian airspace while flying out of South Vietnam toward the North. There were Viet Cong soldiers strolling about the streets off duty; young men of my age enjoying a respite from their battle against capitalism and from the invading American forces. That was an encounter with a society and a culture that was soon after lost to the ravages of the Khmer Rouge terror. It was my privilege to move freely amongst these beautiful, ancient people, sharing with them their simple and dignified lives before their culture was destroyed, vanishing into the pages of history books.
My youth is now an antique land drifting away into memories. It is a secret place that only a few can enter through our dreams and recollections. But the passions, dreams and hopes of those I met way back then persist as a force within me today.
Now in India I am an architect, living a dream with my life partner, my fellow architects and my wonderful patrons, working in India House at Balewadi on the edge of Pune, an emerging metropolis in this chaotically changing world. Change is all around me. Yesterday is becoming an antique land of memories and we are thinking of tomorrow in terms of bits and pieces, in the form of designed little enclaves that hopefully will act as models for a better future. All of us, young architects and old, students and teachers face huge challenges.
India, like America, is a land of individuals. Like America, its composite parts are diverse. India is composed of a billion initiatives of a billion people. These are sometimes in conflict and sometimes in alignment. Living in India is a huge challenge demanding understanding, patience and perseverance. This vast complexity of personalities, multiple visions, values and ways of doing things is a continuous source of inspiration and motivation. The very name of the country sparks my imagination and my curiosity even after living more than half a century amongst its wonderful people. The search here is to find the common thread that weaves all of these strands into one cloth. That is the fun of it all. What is amazing is that within all of this diversity there are so many threads that tie everything together into a stable pattern; always in flux, always in transition, always changing, yet dependable and unified.
Somehow I have always felt most at home in India; more so even than in America or Europe. I love the chaos, the dynamic synergy and the way things settle into their own unique order. I love the warmth of the people, expressed through smiles and laughter. I love the variety of characters and the complexity of the society. I love the smell of rain on parched earth, wafted on the breeze from the distant mountains as the monsoon approaches. I love the sounds of insects at dusk and the songs of birds at dawn, when the sun peeks over the horizon onto verdant fields.
I love the early morning chatter of the boys who run India House, as they prepare for yet another day. I have loved people and people have loved me, making India my natural abode. But most of all I love the inherent curiosity of Indians. They never leave you alone until they have queried every aspect of your private and family life. Probably I am just the avatar of another traveler from a previous life here in what is now an antique land. My soul knows this place! Perhaps I was a migratory bird living winters on the shores of Sri Lanka and summers in the high Himalayas! I find a harmony between the soil and myself, enjoying friendships with people of many communities, religions, castes, and ethnic groups from across India. It is surely my destined home. The passion behind my plans and designs for India, Sri Lanka and Bhutan emanate from being a part of this harmony and vibrating within it. As an architect I am merely a hand following its innate force, giving materiality to India’s deep well of wisdom.
The search here is to find the common thread that weaves all of these strands into one cloth.
As I have said to you several times in these letters, there is only one kind of good luck in life and that is to have good teachers. I have had more than my share of them, dating way back to the 1960s when I studied under Jose Lluís Sert, and when Walter Gropius strolled through the studios at Harvard, where I was a young student. I can go back further as a teenager studying under unknown masters like Harry Merritt and Robert Tucker, or I can go back to my childhood of green lawns, flowering trees, rolling hills, clear streams filling lucid lakes, adorned with water lilies, turtles, alligators and blessed with yellow butterflies hovering above.
Within one’s memory lies a vast treasure house of images, puzzles, nostalgia, possibilities, constructs, values, ideas and thoughts of the future. It is the unique ability of the human race that we live primarily in the past, using the present to forge images and scenarios of the future. Unlike other animals we lack the peace of living only in the present, intuitively resolving the challenges of the moment that our instincts are prepared for. We are restless by nature, concerned with multiple future scenarios, both good and bad. Nothing in the future seems certain to us, which makes us curious to know what tomorrow will bring. Every sunset forebodes a hundred sunrises. The setting sun makes us contemplate what will be our contribution for a better tomorrow.
Having said all of this, having shared my stray thoughts and emotions, I feel in the end life is all about being a perpetual student, finding good teachers and walking starry-eyed under the continuous spell of curiosity.
Glossary
Akhada: wrestling arena
Ashram: spiritual hermitage; a stage of life
Beedi: a thin, South Asian cigarette filled with tobacco flakes and wrapped in a leaf tied with a string at one end.
Bindaas: being fun, frank, fearless and valuing freedom in all its forms.
Bollywood: informal term popularly used for the Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai
Brahmacharya: one of the four stages of life (ashramas) in traditional Indian civilization as outlined in the Manusmruti. It refers to an educational period of 14–20 years which starts before the age of puberty. During this time the traditional vedic sciences are studied along with the religious texts contained within the Vedas and Upanishads. This stage of life was characterized by the practice of strict celibacy. One who is in this stage is called a Brahmachari.
Busti: a hutment or small inhabitation of people.
Chawls: buildings which are often 4 to 5 stories with about 10 to 20 tenements, sharing sanitary facilities.
Chela: religious student or disciple.
Chortens: a Tibetan Buddhist shrine or monument.
Dal: a dried legume (as lentils, beans, or peas); an Indian dish made of simmered and usually pureed and spiced legumes.
Dilli haat: a combination craft bazaar and food plaza located in the heart of Delhi.
Gharana: In Hindustani music, a gharānā is a system of social organization linking musicians or dancers by lineage or by apprenticeship, and by adherence to a particular musical style. A gharana also indicates a comprehensive musicological ideology.
Gopuram or Gopura: a monumental tower, usually ornate, at the entrance of any temple, especially in Southern India.
Jaali: a perforated stone or latticed screen, usually with an ornamental pattern constructed through the use of calligraphy and geometry.
Kuchcha: something raw, unfinished.
Kund: well or water reservoir built as part of a temple complex in Indian temples.
Mandala: a Hindu or Buddhist graphic symbol of the universe/ cosmos; specifically: a circle enclosing a square with a deity on each side that is used chiefly as an aid to meditation.
Mani walls: stone structures with intricately carved stone tablets, mostly with inscriptions.
Mumbaikar: a person from the city of Mumbai.
Nalla or Nallah: an arm of the sea, a stream, a watercourse, or a steep narrow valley.
Otta: a platform in front of the house for informal seating.
Rishi: a Hindu saint or seer.
Serai: a traditional travelers’ halting place, usually within a protective wall in which sleeping niches are built. There are trees in the central open space with sitting/sleeping platforms.
Shamiana: popular Indian tent shelter, which is commonly used for outdoor parties, marriages, feasts, etc.
Shishya: student
INDEX
A
Ability-to-pay 221
Aegean Sea 44
Aga Khan Award 62
Agarbatti 278
Age of Reason 190
Ahmedabad, Gujarat 13,17,19,27,48,52,53,54,55,56,57,79,81,85,94,105,126,175,185,186,191,194,197,222,232,236,238,263,267,268,269
Akhada [story] 300,307
Akkisetti, Ramprasad 15
Alagh, Yoginder 15,22,55,185
Albert and Victoria Museum 52
Alto, Alvar 107
American Institute of Architects 77,111
An American Architecture [Wright, Frank Lloyd] 43
An Autobiography [Wright, Frank Lloyd] 43
A Personal Matter [Kundera, Milan] 277,289,299
Arcadia 143,203
Architectural Association 52
Architectural Record [magazine] 77,111
Arcosanti 49
Art Nouveau 175
ASAG 94
Letters To A Young Architect Page 28