At the 145-year-old heritage Faculty of Arts building of Vadodara’s Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU), a group of three men stand on the campus grounds, considering how best to send some intricately carved sandstone jaalis to their peers standing on the first floor of the building. Inside, a worker is busy polishing heavy wooden door frames while another is painstakingly painting over a delicately engraved potted plant on the facade on the ground floor. For the last 18 months, the MSU’s 19th Century arts faculty building, with its amalgam of Indian and Byzantine arches and its peculiar marriage of local Gaekwad and the Baroque architecture, has been humming with activity. Here, 100 workers have been working on a long but ambitious project: to breathe new life into the iconic double-layered masonry dome designed in 1880 by British architect Robert Fellows Chisholm. What makes the project complex yet exceptional, according to experts involved in it, is how it uniquely blends traditional building materials such as lime plaster and sandstone with out-of-the-box ones – such as a mixture …