Decorations

Sometimes life places you in a very ironical situation.

As architects, we have been trained in an aesthetic sensibility which is different from the taste that happens to encompass us. Decoration and design is an intrinsic part of the daily lives of people in India. Each festival, each occasion always has a big share of preparation activity that goes in decoration and arrangement. Thus, as a country, every moment we produce numerous ideas, for makeshift decorations. I am not quite sure if as architects we are made to appreciate them. At least I am not a big fan of such inpromptu ad hoc aesthetics.

I think the closest space building exercise for fresh architecture students is the making of the Ganpati Pandal. When students make an "architectural model" for the first time in the course, they almost end up making ganpati mandals - with plenty of colours, real grass, or atleast plastic grass, flowers, thermocole bricks, patterned papers, frills, poster colours, dried leaves...and all that. The only problem I have with these models is that they do not respect SCALE. All tableaus that are built are too representational to be architectural. So I have been strongly discouraging students to make such models - that they make during Ganpati, Janmashtami or Christmas.

Perhaps I too started to experiment with such spatial models with Christmas tableaus in school, but Janmashtami celebrations at our house has always involved plenty of decorations, and that too with toys, clay statues, bricks, etc.

I was always skilled at making all these crafty things, and so people in my society often call me for such decorations. Although after doing an architecture course, my viewpoint towards these decorations has changed, and as far as possible, I avoid them - because they are only about decoration. This year (just a fortnight back), I was called to decorate the Ganpati pandal of our building. I made mountains out of POP, a very tried and tested trick. However, I felt very funny doing this, since as a faculty of design in architecture, it is me who keeps telling students not to get into "making ganpati pandals". I wonder what this exercise of making a Ganpati tableau does to me as an architect...

The story doesnot end here, rather, the real part of the story comes here. A random DNA (Daily News and Analysis) survey of the 600 Ganesh pandals around the suburbs took place 7 days ago. They selected 20 best decorated Ganesh Pandals across their survey. Our society got the FIRST prize!!! I dont know who the surveyers were, but although our decoration was not eco friendly, nor was our attempt to achieve it, the newspaper (DNA,Sat, 24th July- http://epaper.dnaindia.com/epapermain.asp x?queryed=7&eddate=9/25/2010))reports it as

"Ganesh Idol: 5 ft made up of Clay with the Himalayas in the background

Decoration: White Cloth used to depict the Himalayas,

Colorful Cloth Drapes & Real flowers to decorate the mandal"

Reporters always mess it up - they goof up so much! (and the always miss out important names, eg: the decorating team!). The above information has been printed without verification by us. None of the society members knew when these people came for a survey!

Anyway, so here is the news report and the small announcement function that we had in our society today. All were excited to have the trophy. I only worry that this event will become more institutionalized in the coming years and I will be pulled in more and more into this!

I wondered if this was an indirect message by Ganpati that "don't consider these decorations unsophisticated". Well, I remain confused, although I never liked what I did at the tableau here, a strange feeling grips me now...

What is this kind of situation supposed to mean?

Baghban III

I dont understand my relation with relationships. Relationships are very fragile - they are not for people who have a really hard head. And one perhaps takes a life time to learn how to handle them. Sometimes i feel i am too critical about relations - i don't respect relations. The consequences of such an attitude is that i take a lot of liberties to do things which i assume can not be questioned. But such is not the case in real life. Especially when you take moral stances.

I don't know what it is to be a mother? Mother for some one else is just a relation, but being a mother is describing the relation itself. It does not remain a relation then. It is not about two bodies then. Why would one body care so selflessly for another body? Not only physically, but mentally too? What is it to be mentally and physically so? Often I question my familiarity with my mother. I don't think I know her enough. I think i take her so much for granted!

One of the fallacies that my family (in the sense of men vs women) falls into is to compare physical activities of both these genders. I have myself been very critical of this - is physically, a man stronger than a woman? does it affect in the work that we do? My friend Neha (Parkar) always maintained that women are physically weaker than men. I always refuted. Physical strength, i assumed, comes from the mind. But i think a mother is more about the mind, than physical. She goes beyond the physical to achieve something that does not even an achievement. Actually I am not even able to express in words how disgusted I am to understand how I know my relationships.

Can one imagine mothers behaving tit for tat? Can anyone image getting hurt back when you hurt your mother? Sometimes, I have told her things that I didn't ought to, and found no way of expressing my guilt. As children in our kind of social setup, we are never taught to express to parents (its the fear-respect relationship we are brought up in). But we don't even have the courage to say sorry for something wrong that we did to our parents. Once, I came home frustrated, and just passed her a comment - and immediately i realised how wrong it was. It took me an entire night to write a sorry note, which i kept in her room near her pillow to express my guilt. I don't know if she read it, i don't know if she skipped it, but the next morning, things were better for me. But what I am surprised about is that how timid we (children of our generation in our family) are to articulate communication to our parents.

The truth is that we do feel about them, but can not express. We are not equipped with the language in which to express. We never appreciate her for a tasty meal she makes, but we do make a point when a pinch of salt is more in the dal. She takes it courageously. I don't know how. But that does not mean we do not appreciate when she makes an excellent recipe. We are just not taught to appreciate her. The question here is - should you be taught this? who should teach you this?

I suspect sometimes if this is a western thought - in convent schools, (where my nephews study), they communicate to their mothers much effectively. They are taught to say things to their parents. The schools take a lot of efforts for parent-child activities. There is a lot more glib communication between them. We never had such interactions. During our time, it was only the Open house day when the teacher would tell the parent about the ward. That was the kind of relationship that was strengthened between the parent and the ward - a highly institutional, instructional and now i feel utterly stupid.

When once, my principal wrongly called my parent (mother) to meet for some of my wrongly represented activity, I felt so embarrassed, and I cried in front of 40 people in my class after my mother left. It was purely because of the kind of societal values that i was brought up in - of holding parents' nose high. What made me cry was my misrepresentation of the 'institutional' or ideal image that i mentioned before.

Once when I could not finish my Hindi paper (and left questions worth 7 marks), I entered home crying, and my mother consoled me so beautifully, that I felt even more confident for the coming exams. It was my mother who used to train me in Hindi, and I was one of the best students in hindi, which again made me remind of the "institutional" image we "must" represent. Although I managed to get 2nd highest in spite of leaving 7 marks, i now wonder what must have made my mother completely ignore the 7 marks (institutional instruction) and cajole me at that instance... how could she remain out of it...the institutional way in which we were supposed to be brought up in?

I remain with these questions, investigating where does the gap lie, what is the problem, why this gap, it makes me uncomfortable to think of myself as inconsiderate...i hope i am able to manage some middle path for myself.

Second Year Exhibition

After a lot of struggling, grumbling, cribbing, pushing, thinking, working, the exhibition of the second year students was finally realized. We had as the jury : Kamu Iyer, Ravi Hazra and another person from Goa (whose name I forget).

Since the project was about the1:1 installations, there were no hard core drawings that any of the groups made. Earlier the students were asked to prepare sheets on corel draw. None of the groups had an idea to work on it, although they have been taught how to use it. But when the canvas becomes 8'x8' on a computer screen of 21", things have to definitely go haywire. I rejected the idea of computer drawings primarily because it was second year - where one needs to engage more with the hand done work. All we therefore had was the process rough drawings that were used to deliberate upon their constructions. These, i call second year "working drawings". It was a mammoth task to make the students understand that process drawings are not bad - that they are pinnable, that they are as beautiful as the final ones... For the entire beginning setup of the exhibition, students argued if they were to put such sheets. They never had the concept of having such drawings as final. They used to reproduce their process sketches on the final sheets. It told them that it was ridiculous to do so.

I felt there was a rich sense of beauty in the process work. My task was to bring in content on to the boards - mostly students get stuck in presentation drawings and making things look beautiful, and do things which tell nothing about their projects. I asked all students to bring in the lousiest of sketches that they had made over 2 months. They got them and then followed a process of selecting what we could possibly use. Cutting torn tracings neatly, straightening crumpled papers, neatly cutting all rough tracings into one size and then organizing them together - I felt as if i was making a beautiful collage of memories.

I wondered how students did not value such brilliant process drawings they made. Perhaps thats because they never refer to books. They are from the internet age. They are facebook people - people who see silly videos and "like" them. Partly, i think also their teachers never told them to concentrate making hard core process drawings, intense, and preserving work produced by spending long hours on board...

I had a tricky situation with two groups who didnot have almost any work! The painting group and the Parasite group. In all, the painting group had 12 'blue' pencil colour sketches of the same place, that too of different sizes. I asked them to make A3 photocopies of all of them to regularize the colour since it did not relate to their actual work at all. Then the remaining space was filled up by 8 A4 pictures. I dont know again, why students dont even understand the relationship between the sizes of papers i.e. A3=2(A4) = 2(A5). No one told us... One can use these proportions to think of organizing things on board...

Anyway, may be they were brain dead. So i just instructed and they executed. That was all I cared atleast for yesterday.

The second group had only 9 small sketches, almost of the size 15 x 15 cm - and other sizes. I asked them to regularize it to a format and then they had to put it in a grid. When I left things to them, they started making patterns from those squares - it was ridiculous! I just asked them to follow me and execute.The entire panel was blank otherwise. They creatively filled up with a stick model of their inspiration picture.

Another group which didnot really have any final drawings of the project was the tree - so we made a large tree cutout and pasted on the board. They executed it quite well and we made a put other process sheets to complete a frame.

Constant nagging, following up, trials and tribulations made the exhibition work somehow. As soon as Atul and i left, perhaps the entire class slept over. I say this because we had instructed them to finish things and they were still the same the next morning when we arrived.

Students were all well dressed - but the exhibition space was in a mess. This was beyond my control. I shouted at many of them, yelled to get them to action again - clean up drive - barrage of peons, house keeping guys and students followed. We removed horde of bags, organized cloth, cleaned of dust, removed garbage - all which should have done much earlier.

What was disappointing was that the AD faculty itself arrived at 9 am - completely unbothered about the whole setup. They also left the place by 10 30 am! They decided not to be there for their jury! This happened the second time. And I have never experienced this in my entire life time. I felt this was extremely irresponsible, despicable and unexpected behaviour.

Atul beautifully briefed about the project to the jury - sometimes i feel he really crisp in what he says. I felt i must have recorded. He assisted the students and the jury throughout. Students were half dead, which I dont know how to comprehend. It reminded me of times when I used to be awake for two nights working on my drawings (I was obsessed with inking) and still come fresh and remain fresh for my and my friends' juries. I listened to all of them - I don't know what would keep me awake. May be again, its just me.

In the end I would like to say that, if this process of putting up the final work was completely under my control, I would have strived to make this exhibition even better. There are many inconsistencies which I would have liked to work upon. But I was handed over the charge only for 8 hours - that too a day before. And I think I did a good job out of it. But it would require much thoughtful students, much trustworthy peers and much more control and authority to do an extraordinarily amazing exhibition...

Surrealism

today we did some surrealist exercises in the class. this is just a reminder to detail this post on my space here...

Language - Writing - Thought

To write, it is very important to understand in what language we think. Often, our expression language being english, our writings in english are translations from our thinking language (often mother tongue or the closest language to it). The way in which we frame our thoughts in english heavily depends on translation of ideas from our thinking language to communication language. We try to inculcate a habit of writing in our studios/sessions. Writing helps crystallize thought, understand our structure of thought.

What I actually want to discuss here is that I have found students expressing much better if allowed to express in their own thinking language. If one is familiar with reading another's thinking language, the maturity of thought is evident. We often read English passages written by students and feel they are not good enough.

I wonder if i am biased when i push students to express themselves in writing. May be that is not what everyone is comfortable with.

Students crave for instructional notes. They never feel like having their own versions of understandings. I used to assimilate my understanding in a separate book right from the 8th standard - I prepared my own notes, I would look up 3 textbooks and pick the easiest sentences to build my answer. I would note down whatever extra the teacher told apart from the textbook - but i do realize that it's only about me! The world is not the same.

What writing does to me, it may not do the same to anyone else. Writing helps me clarify my thoughts; reconsider my thoughts, or even reflect upon my thoughts. I am a confused person. But I constantly find ways of channelizing my confusions into workable things. I think confusions have potentials. One can explore them.

But there are so few of them who like to explore. Students are so less exploratory. Or may be I am too ambitious. But when I donot find myself in a company of exploratory people, I feel lost. How paradoxical! Often i sit in family gatherings and be quiet for hours. Perhaps they talk of different things. Or perhaps I think of completely different things.

Cycloid on sine wave

After reading my post on cycloids, my friend from Harvard tried actually doing this experiment and sent me an interesting video.

This was long due.
Here it is for all!