January 1997, Los Angeles International Airport.
I had hesitantly pointed to a “doughnut” resting amidst other tantalizing treats behind a spotless glass case that now had been marred by my oily fingerprint. “A bagel, you mean?,” the server had politely replied.
Carrying a suitcase full of spices, and $ 200, I was “fresh off the boat”. I knew right then that, despite my long time love-hate relationship with American culture, there was a lot that I didn’t know about America!
More than a decade later, I know the difference between a bagel and a doughnut. I have an Indian-American accent – one that endlessly amuses my friend in India.
He wondered if he had missed the boat during my early days in America. Now, not a day goes by when I don’t read about India Rising! or America Sliding!
I catch him just as he is headed out with his 5-year old to the driving range near his swanky new apartment in Gurgaon, an outsourcing hub outside Delhi. His son can’t wait to start skating lessons at the rink nearby! No such amenities adjoin my tiny, rental unit in Berkeley, California.
He works in a multi-national architecture firm, which spews out glitzy offices and malls, to populate the townships his wife, an urban planner, churns out at the frenetic rate of nearly one per week!
These shining glass towers of India’s new economy are grossly ill-suited to its blasting summers. Air-conditioning them squeezes India’s power resources.
In 2001, the Bureau of Energy Efficiency was formed to initiate a Building Energy Code for India. Ironically, the task of drafting the code that buildings, such as those my friend designs, will have to meet, was “outsourced” to my San Francisco employer.
Why were Americans chosen over competent and cheaper energy-efficiency experts in India? I felt chagrined! Perhaps, American consultants, and an American-style code, were not entirely inappropriate for these cookie-cutter boxes – no different from those crowding the urban downtowns and office parks of America, and quite different from older Indian architecture.
Indigenous Indian architecture’s response to local climate and materials minimized the energy needed for cooling and transporting materials. It also strengthened grassroots economy by keeping it local.
In contrast, these transplanted resource guzzlers demand additional energy to import materials, equipment, and expensive sustainable design consultants, such as my employer, till India has enough personnel and resources to meet the requirements of a Western-style code.
However, India didn’t need a Western-style code to make “green” buildings. Two years before the draft code was adopted, India gave the world its “greenest” building at the time. In 2004, the Confederation of Indian Industry’s Green Business Centre became the most sustainable building under LEED, a voluntary American sustainable design rating system, and adopted worldwide.
The code was adopted to encourage this practice, but its effectiveness is hostage to India’s beleaguering bureaucratic system, whose middlemen and bribes make it possible to flout any well-intentioned mandate.
For example, the structural mandate of the National Building Code is intentionally over-designed to accommodate its routine circumvention by greedy contractors. But buildings continue to collapse and kill people. An unreliable judicial system has done little to discourage this evil practice. In a ludicrous twist of fate, the Bureau of Energy Efficiency has been one of the chief hurdles to the code’s timely adoption.
While the energy code is a good step towards achieving a sustainable growth, an equitable distribution of resources is just as critical.
The outsourcing hubs suck power and water away from India’s villages, creating droughts. Globalization has also forced industrial farming practices and cash crops that strip the soil of nutrients. It indentures farmers to expensive, non-renewable seeds from large corporations.
When these induced droughts yeild a poor harvest, these indebted farmers commit suicide. Failed farms, increased cost of living, and tantalizing Western products have induced greater migration into cities. Once here, a growing economic disparity pushes the urban poor to crime to stay afloat.
In a country, where two-thirds of the population grows food to sustain the beneficiaries of globalization, supporting these farmers is imperative for long-term success. A return to small subsistence farms, mixed farming practices, renewable farm-generated seeds, and a strong infrastructure, is a good start, along with reliable bureaucracy and judiciary.
Aristotle believed that “the most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control”, while Gandhi believed in building the nation bottom-up.
India’s economic success, global visibility and confidence, have definitely empowered the middle-class to demand an investment in India’s villages, which would secure the comfort and opportunities that, for years, Indians went to find in the West.
For little children, that means skating and swimming. For young architects, that means a car, an uninterrupted supply of hot water, a kitchen without rambunctious rats, a roof that keeps the rain out – and the ironically resource intensive luxury of golf!
“Have a nice day!” says my friend, as he heads out to putt. Oceans away from me, he has become more American, too! Just as we have morphed into our semi-American identities, India will need to seize the best of this seamless continental transfer to create a culture that is uniquely and enduringly Indian – exactly as it has done through its long history of invasions.
