This woman walked from Kolkata to Dhaka in 17 days, and I can’t even get off the couch 

As much as the word makes us cringe, your 20s are your years to ‘hustle’, or so they say. This entry into real adulthood – job, bosses, deadlines, house bills, chores, and filing tax returns – can either make you or break you. Some ace it, tapping into their type A personality traits to organise their entire life with glee. Others like to escape into the wilds of Himachal Pradesh for a trek or travel from one hostel to another, exploring diverse cities along the way.

One way or the other, your 20s are a turbulent time for self-discovery. But Gita Balakrishnan has always known what she wanted to do, and she had a plan.

Balakrishnan got her architectural degree, only to realise that, at heart, she wanted to work with communities and give back to society. An advertisement by the AVAS NGO illuminated her next path. They were looking for an architect willing to coordinate with people residing in the slums to make shelter homes. She quickly realised this was what she had been waiting for. “Getting people to draw what they wanted their homes to look like was probably my favourite part of the project,” she tells us.

Now at age 54, still on her mission to inject humanity back into designing homes and public spaces, Balakrishnan is letting her walking do the talking. “I came across an article written by Priya Dutt, where she talked about walking for peace alongside her father, Sunil Dutt, from Mumbai to Amritsar,” Balakrishnan shares. “Bas tabhi se keeda pad gaya tha dimaag mein. (This idea has stuck in my head ever since)”.

In 2022, she put on her walking shoes and set off on a journey from Kolkata to Delhi on foot. She has begun her days at 4 AM, battled 48-degree heat on the streets, lived out of a suitcase for months, and even injured her ankle along the way as she walked for hours, days, and months. But not once did she want to quit.

You’d think that traversing a 1,700 km road on foot would be enough for one lifetime, but not for Balakrishnan. Earlier this year, she decided to walk across two countries—Bangladesh and India. She set a target of 17 days, starting from Kolkata to Dhaka in Bangladesh.

At the end of each day, an exhausted Balakrishnan would return to her room for the day and discuss the day’s observations with her team. “I came across enchanting houses constructed from mud and thatch, which are typically referred to as ‘kaccha ghar.’ Remarkably, these have survived for over 50 years,” the architect says, explaining that in rural areas, the distinction between a ‘kaccha’ or ‘pakka’ house determines people’s marriage prospects. “Logo ki shaadi nahi hoti iske wajahse. (People don’t agree to marriages because of these distinctions). But if a house has withstood the test of time with minimal maintenance, on what basis are we still calling it a kaccha ghar?

The knowledge she’s gained from these walks has convinced Balakrishnan that modern living needs to be reconsidered. “We are now building wall to wall at the end of every site, leaving no room for space or communication. It’s like we are building walls in our minds,” she tells us.

Even though today’s spaces have gotten smaller, the architect is constantly working to find better ways people can reside in the given conditions. Her mission is for other architects and designers to do the same, because, after all, modern problems do require modern solutions.

Inspiration for change can spring from anywhere. It takes some innovation and creativity, especially for something as technical as architecture. This is not the first time we’ve seen it. Remember the zero-energy air conditioner that went viral on social media? And the school in the Thar desert that’s made of yellow sandstone, so it naturally cools itself. The students there now study without worrying about the temperature hitting 50 degrees celsius.

Today, Balakrishnan has set out on a similar mission, determined to create spaces that make life easier through architecture. Perhaps the next big thing has been staring us in the face all this time, and all we need to do is take a walk, get some fresh air and a new perspective.