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?