I don’t remember where I had read these words.
“Things are clearer at a distance, in space as well as time”.

As I move away from school in space and time, it’s understanding is getting clearer while the understanding of self is getting more ambiguous than ever.

The existing surfaces seem inadequate. The self is looking for new surfaces to cling on to, new edges to hold on to, new container to contain one self and new yardstick to evaluate and judge things.

Existing ones are slowly and partly becoming visible and tangible. But I can only see how deeply they are rooted within.

Banganga days...

It is 10:40. I am waiting for Duttaram to get a coffee and his hilarious running commentary for the day. Merlyn is talking to Charles in a tensed voice on phone. He is at airport leaving for Cyprus. Alankar is humming some song with a smile on his face. Mitali is busy checking her emails. After quite along everyone looks relaxed. Last two weeks have been quite stressful. The Chennai project is taking off at full speed. This is my first project in terms of technical detailing. Previously I worked on a planning project and was shifted to Chennai project due to increasing pressure. It has been more than two months and my notions of making a technical drawing have changed considerably. It is fun to see the way Charles uses the medium of a technical drawing to turn anything into a sculpture, a turn of a railing, a strut for glazing, an abruptly standing column. There is nothing in the building as well as in drawing which doesn’t catch his eye and isn’t given a thought. It is amazing to see him being so rigorous for everything, even tiny things, at 77.

Today is our cleaning day. It is fun to clean this office. It is filled with stories. Every piece of paper found is a story in itself. I enjoy excavating these stories.

It is 5:30.I m in office and not feeling very well. I think I am catching fever. The air in the office is quite different today. It has nothing to do with Charles. It feels like a silent evening of monsoon where it has just stopped raining heavily. I have hardly done any work today. I didn’t sleep properly last night. Abhinav gave us his farewell treat last night at café royale, colaba. This was our first dinner together, me, Kalpit, Alankar, Mitali, Manas and Abhinav. I decided to stay up at Amrishes place last night, a wonderful double storey volume with wooden pitched roof, with an enclosed balcony looking over sleeping grant road station. The yellow light makes it even more adorable. I was meeting Amrish after very long. It was almost 2:30 when we realized; we should stop talking and go to sleep since we both have office.
Today is the first day of office without Abhinav. And his absence is making the air more dull and heavy.

My Ahemdabad trip...

It is 9:40. I am alone in the office. No one has arrived yet. Office is calm and silent. Charles is again not in town. I don’t know where he has gone. I just returned from Ahemdabad yesterday. Since quite long I have been planning to visit Ahemdabad, finally I got the chance.

Earlier these visits were quite frequent and elaborate. Now it has reduced down to one visit of 4 days per year. After Mumbai that is the city which I relate to. It is my mother’s home town. My grandfather in his early teenage migrated here from a very small village in Rajasthan in search of a space with more opportunities and liberty. Today it has been more than six decades of living here and they have created their own little space. According to them it isn’t the space where they belong. The search for this mythic space where they think they belong is very visual in their daily practices and imageries with which they have masked their living space. It is through this medium they have been trying to recreate their imaginary homeland and trying to root them.

But I value this space for very different reasons. It occupies quite a considerable space in my memories. As a child, this is the space where I was sent to enjoy my holidays. A holiday, an official day defined for recreation, a time where one was allowed to escape the mechanical routine and do nothing. I enjoyed being here. There was so much space to play. I was not confined to my house. I hardly spent any time inside our house. The compound wall of the bungalows could be easily jumped. Opposite the row of bungalows was a humongous plot of forest with huge compound wall. A patch of maidan in between the forest and the row of bungalows made the forest plot into a spectacle. It wasn’t a forest, but for a child from Mumbai it was big enough to be a forest. It had a tiny one storied bungalow surrounded by huge Neems and Gulmohurs. No one stayed in that house. One yellow bulb used to be always lit, even in the nights. I thought of it as a house of ghosts. My granny used to scare me of putting me in that house when I didn’t eat on time. During afternoons we used to try very hard to jump the wall where it was dilapidated. But the fear was so much that we never got close enough to the house. When all of us loved to sleep on the terrace gazing at the stars, I hated it when I abruptly got up from the sleep in midnight and that ghost house was just right in front, with that yellow bulb. My granny loved that bungalow and the forest because it seemed to be an ideal backdrop for our family photos, an ideal imagery and illusion with which she wanted to frame herself and her family.

But today, the back drop of our family photos has changed. That bungalow and the forest have been replaced by five six storied apartment buildings, which overlook into our houses. Two series of compound wall have appeared on the maidan which used to be our playground and a spectacular water body which once upon a time completed my granny’s family photo. As a child I enjoyed seeing peacocks and monkeys on those Neems. Today I see façade composed of pigeon holes and drying balconies. My granny’s ideal back drop is lost and is replaced by another, but she is not as sad as I am, because my uncle told her that this was just a beginning of Ahemdabad becoming a mega city like Mumbai.

Academic Council presntation.

It is 11:00. I don’t have any specific work to do. I am a bit sleepy too. Charles is back from Chennai after a week, energetic and bright as he has always been. I enjoyed seeing him working. Last week was very loose, even the weekend except the academic council presentation at school. I had decided not to work on the presentation any more, though I had made it instantly for ICHH presentation. Even after five years of giving juries, an idea of presenting still raised my heart beats. But surprisingly I was quite calm at both the presentations. It started considerably late. Me, Tara and Namtu waited in the corridor when the academic council people discussed something intense in the A.V. room. None of us knew why we were called to present. Finally we were called inside and were told everyone gets 15 minutes to present. The council got surprised when they heard 15 minutes each, they assumed it to be 15 minutes for all. The presentation went alright, other than little bit stammering and not finding right words at times, as usual. I didn’t read my slides like before and tried being as clear as possible. The questions asked were quite unusual. Few of them didn’t sound like questions, because they were not asked liked questions, they sounded like judgments arising out of preconditioned mind. I found it strange when people started making judgments instantly leaving no space for discussion, argument and interaction. They sounded like offences at times.
I respected questions much more than judgments.

Question No.1 : your project is not contextual and can be placed at MAHALAXMI RACECOURSE(??) and it wouldn’t change.
I didn’t understand the question, in what way a civic center for a slum of Pascal Maidan can be placed at Mahalaxmi racecourse. I feel I would have asked clearly what she meant rather than attempting to answer it.

Question No.2 : how is your project addressing the insecurities felt by a slum dweller about his living space?
“The project is addressing the insecurities of a slum dweller by proposing a civic center for a slum.”

Question No.3 : your project is not addressing communal friction and communal integration?
“I don’t want to make dramatic statements about Hindu-Muslim integration, but it has always been an integral part of the perception, the perception of programs as well the spaces and the architecture.” The drawings were choreographed to convey the same.

I have never been very good at framing instant answers. I think one should be given time to think and answer. I got a little agitated towards the end, but couldn’t help it.

space and mind..

The train was quite crowded today. I generally took a slow train to come to office, since one needed to be considerably heavy to tackle the forces in the fast train and I knew I wasn’t. Once I got down at Bandra even though I wanted to get down at Churni road, because of the push of the crowd, which I couldn’t resist. But the crowd didn’t seem to affecting much today, I found space in a small corner to sit. The thoughts about discussions I have had with few people kept on popping up in my head…human mind, its constructs, its obsessions, its strategies to tackle crisis when it failed to achieve its object of obsessions, power of spaces to condition our mind etc.
The experience of my visit to Church a day back is still fresh in my head. My family has never had a custom of going to spaces of worship, so I have never built associations with this space in a way someone who visits it regularly has built. I had some strange feeling of disgust, when everyone around me prayed intensely. It was my preconditioned mind which stopped me from feeling the energy of the space which was immense. And the sense of disgust even grew deeper when the priest started speaking about peace. It wasn’t pessimism in any way, but set of questions which I couldn’t answer to myself. I was trying to understand why one came to a space like this, what it meant to an individual, why one liked hearing “nice” or “good” things which one didn’t practice, why was I so disgusted etc. I don’t think I have the answers yet. But I am sure I will have some ideas soon. I will need few more posts for that.

Animals at CCA...

Alan from Doms...calm and composed... Manas: The youngest member yet to be baptized as an animal
Kalpit: our future Abhinav
Mitali : happily spaced out and hungry...
Me