Hi from Delhi, where life is different in every way besides the weather outside: cold and misty. I am staying with a friend of Aditya's who is great and has a wonderful family. They also offered me a bike - which has made delhi enjoyable for a change. And they have a basement with a bunch of books – mostly law-related.
Essentially, in Agra, I've been facing challenges related to be the only one here who has any concept of where I am coming from. Therefore I can get to know the reality here and listen, but when it comes to expressing my interpretation of this reality or even their words, I am limited in what will be understood due to language but also serious cultural gaps.
Below I've posted some thoughts I've had that relate to what I've been up to, trying to organize it someway other than the last post which people mistakenly termed 'a poem'. i wrote different parts at different times so sorry for mistakes and incompleted thoughts that i'm sure exist.
You also get to see a few pictures in my recent posts as I got a bit liberal with my camera to try and see what the response was in and around Agra.
Feel free to comment on these topics or send me an email with your experiences with them.
Hospitality
I wonder what the world would be like if everyone truly cared about others more than themselves – not treated other people better in their own cultural way or simply put others first, but actually were more concerned about others than they were for themselves.
A standard response is the standard abraham mosley – that once basic self physical needs are met than helping others meets a psychological/social need. Call this the development workers concept. Or the whole social darwanism that we treat others better only cuz it makes me as an individual better. Call this the fraternity members concept.
Norms for treating others varies widely but most everywhere I have been there is some cultural engrainings usually derived from religion about how to treat others. Christians are to treat others as Jesus would – lovingly. Greeks maybe ensure that you overeat every visit. Modern Americans are keen on properly compensating any kind act or gift appropriately, and fairly, usually defined as being roughly equal in monetary value. In India there is the Hindu thought that God can appear in any form at any time so any visitor should be treated like God.
When it comes to cross-cultural treatings, things often become a mess of different concepts of gratitude and money, kindness and duty. I think its because what may look like caring for others above yourself in nearly every context is actually just doing what you are supposed to do and not actually selfless concern for others.
Space
The concept of privately owned space immediately led to space becoming one of the most unequally distributed things across the world. Nationalistic land reforms in places like Peru and Bolivia only had limited success, and gradually the forces of globalized capitalism returned it to its 'natural' state alloted according to prior wealth.
In India I have had the hardest time finding space. Space to live in space to work in space to sit in space to meet with others in. These may not require a lot of space, but they do require appropriate space that fits the needs of each.
Recently I discovered the entrance to the Taj gardens and that has become the only space that I have been able to access and do work in efficiently. Its distance from others and lack of work infrastructure make it unsustainalble for a community design space. But in an urban or even peri-urban community, where can you access space without disrupting other happenings? When thinking of a space that facilitates for community engangement in the entire design-make-sell process it essentially needs to maximize access to at least a good number of the community members. Given its done with community consent this should ideally be in the community.
Just renting an ideal space in a peri-urban slum is much harder than it looks as I found it. Pitching a tent-like structure on unused ground may be possible depending on local security and acceptance. Or maybe a structure up on a roof? Over a house of a family you trust? And during its lifetime maybe it can help catalyze the community to set aside, demand for, or build their own community center for use in the long run.
Heat
All over the world except for a thin strip, it is cold for at least a few months of the year. Like here, it is cold from November to February and so hot the rest of the time. The people here stay warm with blankets on the floor, blankets raised off the floor, little electric stoves, or wood and dung cake stoves. During these cold months the sun can only barely be felt for a couple hours a day. I don't know what Bogota is like, but the dispersed solar collectors made famous there would have to really be efficient to operate here.
Biogas is an option, geothermal potentially, but it seems that humans are quite good at making heat. So if it has to do with keeping ourselves warm, then finding ways to maximize our ability to keep in our heat. Or activities for raising our heat production levels that also accomplish other tasks. But of course all I want to do is actually just wear shorts and a t-shirt, turn up the thermostat and then take a thirty minute shower with unending hotwater.
I wish I could wake up in the morning and pull out a body temp regulating scarf like thing with insulation and just wrap my body up. And that this thing would allow full range of motion,let me poop and perspire (would it be needed?) wicking away heat if I am working out, and seal off right amount of body heat to maintain a comfortable living temp as a function of the outside temp and current body temp. Maybe the released waste heat from a daily 1 hour jog or workout routine could be enough to power its regulation during the day.
The closest thing to this I have seen in the last bit has been a little kid whose parents had a little cotton sleeping bad that had arms and a hood attached and they simple zipped 'it' up to keep it warm.
But then I wonder if that is not what the skin is already designed to do? Why didn't we develop a skin that is able to sense cold, use that information to regulate body temp, but to not have the change in outside temp felt by the skin to directly . Essentially why isn't our skin smarter in something so simple as temp regulation when it is so good at things like recreating itself, water regulation, etc.
Designing
Do you have to be a good drawer to design things? I didn't think so, but I'm learning now that if you have concepts in your head and you are the only one with those concepts and the context behind them, someone has to be able to draw and so if you can't, you're limited to communicating intracacies via language, which is not directly visually stimulating and in this case is not well-mastered.
My new neighbor in Nagla Debjit slum asked me to help her child draw Hanuman, a Hindi god, out on a big poster board for coloring and putting up on the wall. I warned her I was really bad, so I think she is looking into other options.
Documenting is one of the most useful things that can come out of drawing. Not knowing what you are documenting for makes documentation quite difficult I find. But having a defined document to output might bias your documenting and blinder your mind from wandering down newer paths.
What I am sure is that designing requires people than just one to be fully involved and proactively critical.
Communicating
I think that everyone is capable of being a 'good person', and actually everyone at some point in time would like to start over and be a 'good person'. But sometimes the more time you spend with someone in a certain context the more you don't get along. I experienced this throughout my life, and figured it had to do with me being stubborn and others being jealous.
Most recently I also think that those same people who end up really not liking me, also at some point decided that talking with me was useless and were no longer interested in exchanging perspectives openly. Add my most recent experience with ngos in India to this list.
I am learning that communication is really much more different across economic/opportunity gaps than cultures. Conversations with nearly everyone in Agra is dominated by money and status, sadly seemingly defined by inferiority complexes.
Take the example of Adam on a cycle in nicer Delhi to Agra anywhere. Outside of Old Delhi (south side specifically), which is sort of a more planned set of mixed upper scale residential with some lower (but not slums) class pockets and urban strip mall-like scenes, I will get people looking at me off and on but not saying anything. In search of Wifi I went to many cafes and they will tell me straight up the directions to another cafe. And then if they see my bike they said 'Nice bike' (in hindi). Compare that to Agra, where the typical response if I ask for directions from one cafe to another cafe, 'Oh there are no other cafes around here.' 'And, how much did you buy your bike for?'.
But I am also learning the difference between difficult, collaborative, comfortable and uncomfortable communication. Difficult communication occurs between extreme cultural or other gaps, but this does not necessarily determine its effectiveness or its Uncomfortable communication is when at least one person in the conversation does not respect the other person's views. Comfortable communication requires an acceptance of the other's views as theirs and respects them as theirs. Regardless of what the gap is, collaborative communication can occur as long as both parties are truly open to considering the others' view on any topic as equally worthy or more than their own view on that. And that this is a rare occurrence on any scale regardless of the proximity to each other's culture.
Difficult communication is always for some (me) but here defined as communicating between two people who lack much overlap in their respective backgrounds and experiences. Uncomfortable communication is what I have been experiencing with local ngos. Truly collaborative communication I have only experienced with a very few people anywhere in the world.
I think it is rare because people all over the world are given answers as they grow up, instead of being offered background context and encouraged and enabled to question and search.
Almost always I have to remind myself to reformat the thoughts exiting my brain for the sake of efficiency. But this inherently waters down my actual thoughts. Then it gets filtered by the receiver. What is left afterwards is much less powerful than the original thought. I assume this is the same for everybody, and I wonder how much more efficiently we could communicate by cutting out the watering down by focusing on always receiving the other person's thoughts as 'collaborative communication'.
Uncertainty
Not knowing whats going on around you or even where you are going is a micro-scale of uncertainty that I have never grappled with. Nano-level uncertainty might be being totally lost in the ups and downs of every step we take, but I'm not sure I'm that lost. I still have a basic framework I'm working on and a few people to depend on for advice and help.
And I've always been pretty macro uncertain, like most everyone else with an openended life boundary, not sure about what will come a year or two down the road.
But right now I'm unsure of who to trust, whether my bag is safe in its room, whether the auto driver was mad at me or not, whether the muslim restaurant guy wouldn't serve me because I was white, whether the railroad area is really the machete guys' property, how do you evaluate the structural integrity of a house without columns, what does it mean for an ngo director to seem to fully understand english at one time and then not too another, is handling buffalo poop unhealthy, can someone really be more interested in his organization that the community it serves?
Reality
My most recent epiphany has been that we think we are designing for different contexts, say 'the developing world' but we are actually designing for our own reality not theirs. And when it comes to bringing those designs to them I used to blame it on not being designed in their context. Now I see that just being in their context dosen't mean I am designing for their reality, only intheir reality. I am still designing for a developed reality. And that is the story for everything that doesnt happen fully in a certain reality from issue identification to idea to validation.
And the two realities I am facing right now are so starkly different in every way, except for maybe common humanity that the greatest hurdle to sparking this 'reality design' is the simple fact that they are being invited to design for issues they do not feel in a way in which they do not understand. Essentially its got to be a more even-sided mix of realities in the design process to match the mix of realities inherently present in the background, issue identification, and prior art. If we want to apply high-tech scientific observations and research, educated foreigners, and developed world methodologies to areas where they have not been exposed to any of these and their reality is defined just as much by their own approaches and livelihoods you really need more than one person from either side.
This means that sending a couple bright kids off from Nagla Debjit to study in the US, nor sending a couple bright kids off from the US to implement in Nagla Debjit will be effective. You need to have a much more collaborative and larger mix of committed people working together from both sides to gradually develop common understandings. This is possible, but are those kind of people out there? in Nagla Debjit? in the developed world?
