Some due explanations

In the last one week of tranquility, I could articulate answers to two questions that I have been stuck with since quite some time:

1. Why I obsessively write?

2. Who is blind?

The first question was posed quite honestly to me by my students in the beginning of this academic year. They would sheepishly ask me "why do you write?". I did not really have an answer then. But as I now think of it, what I have been noting down during lectures since then is concepts that I could never explore earlier. There have been so many things that related to me so closely which still did not occur to me as a student. The difference I feel is that earlier I noted down information, while now I note down ideas. Nevertheless, without the information, the concepts would not have been as richer as they appear to me now. The answer to the first question appeared to me after my reading of Calvino:

"I'm one of those who write because they can't handle speaking; sorry about this folks... ...That morning I was on the trams early and I saw people reading the things I had written, and I watched their faces, trying to understand what line they were up to. Everything you write, there's always something you're sorry you put in, either because you're afraid of being misunderstood, or out of shame. And on the trams that morning, I kept watching people's faces till they got to that bit, and then I wanted to say:"Look, maybe I didn't explain that very well, this is what I meant," but I still sat there without saying anything and blushed."

-Wind in a City, Numbers in the Dark and other stories, Vintage

While that's pretty much the thought that goes on as I put things down, another thing that slowly has appeared to me is that language is a very limited tool of communication. And if one was to articulate everything one thinks and imagines through language, it becomes very difficult to word it - and there lies the challange of putting something across exactly as you think through language. But I am for layered meanings - all which may be right. I like to write in a way where metaphors and puns add to the dimensions of text. And I have yet not found my way of writing. But perhaps the blog is just a way to develop my skill of writing.

To put it simply, sometimes, we find it very difficult to put down or express what we exactly want to say. Writing is about how one negotiates this difficulty. Earlier, I never understood what one meant when he/she said "I like writing / writing is my hobby" - but I think now I clearly know that writing is about negotiating the terrain of communication.

on the other hand,

The question about "who is blind?" was raised to me at all possible forums where I presented my thesis. And while I tried to procrastinate the answer at all the times, there were times when I sincerely replied "I am still to find an answer...I don't know who is blind". To be frank, I also asked this to Prasad Shetty, since he was the one who pushed me to investigate into the blind. But I think, he too was not prepared at that point of time to answer it. Anyhow, I waited for a long time (about 3 years now) to be able to frame an answer to this question in such a way that it defines all dimensions in which my thesis could be interpreted in (as mentioned earlier about layered / dense writing). Here it is:

A blind is a person who does not have a vision of his own. The blind believes in the world about which he/she is informed, without investigation. The blind's reality is a borrowed one. Blindness is the inability to have faith in one's own reality of existence, because one can not see.

I would stop at that. But I would have loved to detail it in the way Guy Debord writes the 'Society of the Spectacle' or Gerog Simmel writes the 'Metropolis and the Mental Life'. In some ways, I find a lot of juice still left to be extracted out of my thesis. I say this because I am not satisfied with what I wrote in my dissertation. Kaushik (Mukhopadhyaya) told me after I presented my thesis at KRVIA that "the Cinema for the Blind can not be an architectural project. It can not be a building." And although it echoed with my thoughts too (because cinema and blind both negate each other all the time), the B Arch thesis had to be form-al. The thesis had to end in a building. But what I never got an opportunity to ask him was, "Then what it could be...?"

Now I feel quite relieved. May be there is a poetic way in which I can answer the question of the blind. And I could explain the terms in the answer too. And the articulation of blind in such a language allows me to have a dual narrative running through my architectural intervention - one of the physical handicap and other of the social handicap. Most people do not agree with the duality of the thesis. But I would take a Venturian stance and say, "I am for either/and; I am for plurality of meaning."

However, there is no point elaborating over this because at no forum, have I had the opportunity to engage in a kind of debate on the language of architecture I adopted. Was the project so convincing for all, or was it too difficult to critique? I wonder.