The religion boasts a very humanitarian approach to life; to serve humanity is to serve God, as some signs around the compound will tell you. This feat is proven in its entirety on the sheer volume of travelers, pilgrims and devotees that come through the gates. All throughout the day and night volunteers are working to sweep the premise, to clean the temple, and enacting their duty to service the people of this sanctuary.

Most noteworthy are the eating grounds provided here. The Langar Khanna (Blessed Food) is a completely systematized wheel of food for the people. No cost for entrance and all are welcome. Everyone eats together in lines on the floor so there is no distinction in class here. Thousands of people come through these gates everyday, and everyday they provide this service. It is all funded by the amount of donations and volunteers provided.

First, you get your metal dish, a metal bowl for drinking and a spoon. Then you, like hundreds others like you at this time, enter the large hall where everyone will sit in lines, cross legged. Volunteers then come by with spoonfuls of daal (lentils), rice, curd, or halva (a sweet flour mixture) in the mornings. All vegetarian options. Water is poured into the bowls for drinking and the food is eaten with small rotis (similar to pita bread). After you are done, you carry your plate outside, hand over the spoon to these men sitting in chairs, and then you pass your dish and bowl down an assembly line of volunteers who take the dirty plates in large trolleys over to the dish washing area where even more volunteers are ready to clean all the dishes that come their way. Then you move along to the side of the Langar Khanna and take another metal bowl for chai (tea with milk) and enjoy it amongst a crowd.

The real magic is in the process and the speed with which they can get you in, fed and out without having to wait in any queues longer than a minute . The food is another miracle in the making. Behind the Langar you will find enormous vats bigger than the biggest cauldrons you’ve ever seen, with, you guessed it, a volunteer at the ladle. A group of women are rolling the rotis and cooking them in light vegetable oil. All of this is then brought up to the main hall and given to the hungry guests. It is truly a mechanism of wonder how it works so effortlessly and so accurately without any hang ups. One feels so overjoyed with the system afterwards, you can’t help but be so impressed that you end up donating a fair amount!

That is not all the magic of this place, for people also sleep on the tiles in the hundreds, families huddled together, rich, poor, travelers, you name it.

This whole system really got me thinking about how such a system can be, and to some extent is, being implemented in Canada and other countries. The problem with the soup kitchens in Canada is that they are for the poor only, and thus get little support to sustain themselves. Imaging having such an impressive device in your home city. How would you get everyone to sit, rich and poor, pilgrim and traveler? Is this kind of system only imaginable in a religious context? One wonders if the hymns of the Langar Khannas walls are right: To serve humanity, is to serve God.

I, for one, see a huge benefit to even spending tax payers money on such a system, for what else do we spend our taxes for if not to help those in need. What if there was a large enough soup kitchen-cum-dormitory for travelers and poor people alike, powered by volunteers that use the service. Imagine driving down the street and a beggar at your window asking for money for food, and you proudly being able to point him in the direction of the Langar Khanna. If the poor people are given food, accommodation, and a clean space, then what then would they beg for? They can spend their free time learning a trade, getting off their feet. Special needs cases can be involved in addressing the poor who suffer from mental illness. I believe such a design could exist, and would love to work with anyone passionate enough about this to make it exist.

The best part in my eyes, is that such a system can also be 100% environmentally friendly. The structure can be build in such a way that it uses organic food grown from the compost of its own waste, electricity can be powered through solar panels, static absorption technology, biomass gasification, heat from the cauldrons can become thermal heaters to dry laundry and bring heat into the building.

One can only dream of such a perfect design and its possibility. There are probably hundreds of factors to consider in such a design, and those can be overcome. That’s enough excitement for one night.

Cheers

I had the pleasure of visiting Teri Gram estate today in Gurgaon, which is on the outskirts of Delhi. It is a project of The Energy and Research Institute (TERI) foundation, which began under the patronage of Ratan Tata in the 1970s. It is now under the leadership of Dr. Pauchauri, noble laureate winner for sustainability.

The campus is literally in the middle of nowhere, which symbolizes its removal from urban waste societies, but what a retreat it was indeed. Upon arrival, I was given an electronic car which resembled a CNG rickshaw, green in colour obviously. We passed by golf courses, cricket fields and lush vegetation. The retreat itself was a very modern design with high end facilities. Its primary source of light was from the sun, and it had no air-conditioning. In fact, this facility produces no waste.

I got a guided tour of the facility which began with looking at the structure itself, its energy efficient design, its use of wind-air ducts that run 4 meters below the earth and is cooled and shot up through the building with the use of fans. To complement this invention, warm air ducts run up the building so that when the cold air enters the room there is somewhere for the warm air to go. The idea first emerged in ancient Greece and is now something taught in elementary science – hot air rises! So why have contemporary builders not heard of this concept? Got me.

We then visited the waste disposal center, or maybe I should say the waste garden. Here, human excrement is dumped into a pond where plants of the phramites austravlis family grow. These plants stand about 2-3 meters high out of the water, the genius is in the roots, as these are water plants, they actually consume all of the bio-waste, essentially cleaning it and leaving behind clean water. Currently most of that water is used to water the garden and golf course, however some is taken and purified even further so that it actually becomes drinkable. Imagine turning our sewage ducts back into our own drinking water system.

From here I was taken to see their biomass gasification unit, this is the source of most of their power, and it comes from wood chips and bio-mass pellets. Here the pellets are burnt at temperatures of 1200ºC, and the gas is then turned into power generation, or thermal heating which heats water canisters that provide hot water for the campus. There is a small degree of thermal heat loss that occurs, and right now they are experimenting with an addition that will dry the wood chips and thus reduce the moisture to make the system more effective.

The trip ended at a tissue culture plantation where they use GMO plants to replicate thousands of species of plants for commercial use. The admit that they are not working toward biodiversity, but that their product is scattered all over the place and that it wont impact natural eco-systems. As long as they are not creating entire forests out of this replicated genome, they should not have a negative impact on eco-systems. Seems legitimate enough, I’d like to hear your opinion.

This model is definitely a best case practise in architectural genius, and one can only hope that this made in Asia solution can spread to architectural schools all over the continent.

Visit the gallery here to see photos of the entire visit.