Drawings

Techno Cultural Schisms

Today morning as soon as i entered office i saw parmeshwar and we involuntarily struck off a casual conversation. He passing told me that he forgot his mobile phone at home. As he was leaving, he remembered something and turned back. He asked me if he could borrow my phone to make a call at his home. Initially i felt he wanted to inform his parents that they must not call him during day in case they wanted to contact him. But he went on saying later that he must inform someone at his him to switch off his phone.

I offered him my new touch screen Samsung ace and he was perplexed. He honestly and boldly requested me to dial his residence number passing a quirky remark on 'touch screens'. I enjoyed it. He waited patiently for his mother to pick up and respond. As soon as his mother picked up, she herself reminded him of the fact that he had forgotten his mobile at home. Going on further he asked his mother to switch off his phone. He waited for his mother to get his phone and then began: "press the button on top left and the bottom left...', and then kept on repeating... Although his mother tried hard, she couldn't figure it out. He went on explaining her to press the 'red' button. She didnot register. Paro silently gave up as if he already anticipated his mother's failure. He concluded suggesting her to get it switched off from his father.

This is the story of our struggle with the technological revolution. We crib, talk, try, cry and adjust with technology. We use universal references like top, bottom, red, white, etc to make others understand about it. These references too fail. The idea of serial pressing and operations donot work. Manuals of technical languages for operating gadgets fear away the older generations. The older generation would have been happier if they only had to press a single button. Or just pick up a call like that on the landline. For some.like marketing people, such struggles become USPs of their innovated products that resolve some cultural issues in technology. Others build up on agencies that can demonstrate to them...

Inspite of all this, i think we can only get to the next level of technology digesting the half baked developments in this sector.

Naiharwa / Kabir

Note the Lyrics. Personally, I like the Kailash Kher version more from his first album Kailasa.

To be read with this post on dagagiri

Seven Social Sins

Internal aggressions

Why does one look to move away from one's own context? What is the need to travel? Why does this occasional internal desire of fleeing away occur? Which kind of space constructs such circumstances? Are these implications of social space? One of the prime reasons i want to go away from my place is because it has remained too conservative for a very long time. From parents to seniors to friends to students to most colleagues, all are so narrow minded and so closed to the world that this place seems almost suffocating. The social institutions bask in their own rotting principles and it is almost impossible to overturn the educational instituions anytime soon. Hypocrisy is another large value, the inheritance of which always puts a fake mask on the name of progression. Everyone claims to be open, but want to be in their own comfortable positions. It is like a moving wheel just lifted slightly above the ground. Everything seems to be happening but we don't seem to be moving ahead.

We have hardly been productive, since we seldom commit. Commitment is a responsibility. Every responsibility has risk. Perhaps that is why we fear to commit. Being productive would mean opening up ourselves for judgement. If we become productive, we can look back and see we have created and thus can evaluate ourselves. We hardly leave such traces behind thus making ourselves difficult for interpretation. Perhaps that is why we are a land of mythology and poetries. We take a lot of pried in our history of non-building or the idea of nothingness. Everything is layered and open for interpretation. For some time, i too would have loved such layered past since it allows deep penetration. But it also makes us an extremely slippery and uncommitted race.

We take a great pride in this legacy of ours. I am fed up of such slipperiness. Perhaps this is not an age to afford slips. I can not slip now to damage my crucial bones. I need to stand and therefore develop a position to be able to open up different perspectives. Perspectives will allow multiple views. Poetry shall follow - after all, i began my life with it. I want to go out to become more rational to be able to appreciate my own context of irrationality. Irrationality perhaps may not be a correct word that exactly defines the spirit of this place.

Although they say that the grass on the other side is always greener, still at least from here, other developed countries seem to be much more progressive and receptive to different ideas. "My world" is only a construct of my own limited exposure. It is made up of people i know and things i am around. I need exposure to make comfort with the place i live in. I need to know if other contexts are as difficult to live. I want to test if i can stay with myself for long enough to produce ideas.

Peeling History

Falling buildings have along railway lines of western suburbs have revealed to me another layer hidden behind the facade of an existing interesting building. Layers of urban fabric morph into new forms in the process of which they expose glimpses of hidden cultural manifests that are never available to us otherwise.
One wonders how to capitalize on such events to record moment which will be soon lost to the monsters that will again cover the temporarily revealed history.

The city is an evolving script which changes its own interpretation depending upon the position of the viewer. The changing visuality through the door frame of my train compartment manifests the above idea in reality. It seems as if suddenly someone decided to cut a new section through the everyday city.

Academy of Architecture: Studio Space

Fruits again

Terrace Cultures

The absence of terraces in high rise buildings has disrespected an old atmospheric culture of people in India. People in India share a distinct relationship with the sky and celestial bodies. They begin their day by worshipping the sun and eat their food on certain special.days only after seeing the moon. Festivals like Id and karva chauth are so closely tied to the worship of moon.

High rise buildings hide them off, create difficult viewing tunnels. Pent houses further eat up terraces. The space of the terrace in a building which was once public and readily available to every member of a building has now been lost to wealthy people who prefer to live above everyone commanding grand views of the city. This reflects the capitalistic culture of the city that has eaten up old customs and traditions which people still follow.

Gardening, kite flying, feeding birds, keeping offerings for birds after deaths are all activities intrinsic to our culture which kept terraces as an active place. Even when buildings were four to five storeyes tall, one wouldn't hesitate to run to a terrace during the evening where everyone would meet up, play, walk, etc. Although four storeyes still maintained terrace culture, seven made it difficult. Later, these were too sold off to the communication companies or advertisement companies, to earn money for individual societies. Communication antennae occupy large amount of space on terraces and leave no space to move. Further, their installations are hurtful. Similar is the case with advertisements that come up on buildings. I remember going to a friend's house to view the Halley's comet when it crossed across Indian skies during the '90s, the then recent tall building completely blocked the view of the north sky from my old house.

Thus, the new urban forms have disregarded these very activities of people through which people connected to the world outside them. The sky scrapers have not left any room for people's engagement with the sky. Forget terrace for people, we do not even have enough open space to run out to in case of fire. We thus do not appreciate the different shapes of clouds, the hues of the evening sky, the moonlight or the pole star - which we all once gazed at through our benevolent barsatis. The sky is perhaps the only space which forces us to think that there exists another reality beyond our own. It allows us to penetrate deep into it and takes us to a macrocosm that we are only made familiar of primarily through our mythological texts. It is the space which the grand mother points at hinting to the devil's house and the place from where Santa Claus arrives. That patch of sky, which has stitched the quilt of memories is now a luxury of the past. Shrinking into the balcony, the terrace shall soon disappear (or has it already disappeared?) as an architectural gesture which allowed human imagination far deep into a cosmos that once chiefly structured our lives.

Why Vertical Studio gets low response at AOA?

It is clear thar students who opted out of  NASA did so because they wanted their share of relaxation time. They perhaps avoid NASA so that they could avoid any extra work. In the competition between  NASA and vertical studio, the latter will never afford to take the lead since
1.  NASA always shall suck up the enthused students.
2. Remaining students would never give their 100% to the vertical studio.

It is therefore critical to reconsider the assumptions that we made regarding  NASA and students participating in it. Firstly that we assumed that  NASA doesnot produce highly analytical work and that its analytical methods are age old and have never been revised. Other assumption we made was that students working for  NASA donot undergo all round development. In making such a categorization, we subconsciously grouped the people not participating in  NASA as wiser. We completely forgot or misread that people not working for  NASA are those who are generally uninterested in extracurricular activities. Their priorities are different and their interests do not fall completely within the realm of architecture. However, the vertical studio, over the last two years have revealed strange results.

Methods of  NASA may be outdated, but students who are enthused unquestionably gravitate towards it and within their boundaries and cone of vision, produce just decent work. These are students who have the skill and motivation to take initiatives.  NASA undoubtedly attracts the better of the student lot - perhaps because the end product is defined and predictable.

This makes NASA a preferred option. There is a format to it which academites have mastered. They love to work within that and keep winning. It is something like being a Lata Mangeshkar and singing only Bollywood romantic songs and winning a filmfare award consistently for multiple years. However, if we were able to bring these students out of the fixed thinking framework and show them what the world is doing, and make them believe that they can conceptualize, initiate and work on newer and more interesting projects, it would be a great departure. On the other hand, if they also understand that they needed to revise old frameworks and challenge existing practices of researching in NASA, they would be much more receptive to what is going around them. Unfortunately, the NASA award at the end of the event is too lucrative for them to understand and push projects that they undertake towards knowledge production.

However, I personally do not think that we have been able to produce good enough work through the vertical studio to be able to challenge the cult of  NASA . In my vision, it shall never even be possible. Until the better students themselves understood that knowledge production is different from just documentation and analysis and that it's a serious affair (don't conflict it with the seriousness of winning an award at an event), we shall keep struggling for good product from our vertical studios. Vetical studios according to me are much more progressive, innovative and exploratory. They are more open, unlike the closed circuits of NASA where data is consciously guarded. Vertical studios also expose one to a variety of people - highly respectable people from various disiplines. It is so much more exciting to talk to them on wider issues and use ones skills towards learning more about a field. I think vertical studios must be tried apart from  NASA period to see if my above theory is true. I am quite confident that the results will be different.

Drawing on the Phone

Sent from Samsung Mobile

First year and theoretical design

I think most of the times, the grand conceptual ideas that we craft out our first year design projects from are not received as intensely as desired. However, this shall always be the case with first year since they are in the initial stages of learning the basics of architecture - from its vocabulary to the issues. Much effort is invested in getting them out of the literal interpretations to explore the poetics. Theories, that we hope to realize into real space, thus waste themselves, although sometimes they do manifest interesting results.

On the other hand, first year projects always end up being conceptual manifestations or translations of theories. These turn up to be what a practising professional would otherwise produce as the first iteration of a theoretical understanding. Thus, i believe that first year projects that i have been involved with have immense potential to substantiate theoretical discourses at a preliminary level. It would be really exciting to work with an enthused student on poetics of space right in the first year, where a student does not accept crits but develops ideas and sharpens his/her mentor's sketchy thoughts. That I think would lead to the success of not only a design, but a design studio.

Art - Expression - Imagination

Can one reduce one's life to be just utilitarian? Why did humans start to paint, craft, dance, sing or write? They are not related to any of our basic needs of living. The intrinsic human need to express is what creates meaning for existence. Is meaning so important for existence? Perhaps it comes out of the desire of the self to go beyond the body. It manifests the need to conquer a larger world, that doesnot exist here. It comes out of the exigencies of the individual for a universal exploration. Through such expression, one makes imagination possible. Imagination allows the self to go beyond the real and existential.

What is the need for sharing imagination? Why do people share imaginations? Why do they ask others to join them with their imagination? Perhaps in imagining a new world, one makes a new social space, which still exists within the current one, and by default is lived through the institutions of the present space. Fears of being singled out, or social exclusion perhaps force us to share imaginations. Through this they try to validate their new imagined social space. Expressions are also probably tools to validate imaginations. The form of Epressions belong to the real world. Hence imaginations become acceptable to some extent. Some believe in them, some remain intrigued, some question and others remain unaffected. Many others consume them.

When expressions are consumed, they take the form of entertainment. Entertainment has thus become an industry. It sucks in a lot of people, emerging into popular culture. It has made its own multifarous institutions. Institutions although validate expressions, they end up guarding them. Art is thus the domain of expression, which gives meaning to life. Architecture has the possibility of engaging with all forms of expressions. Thus it becomes unmanagable and complex - the mother of all arts. We have reduced it to construction and buildings.

If students realize this intrinsic connection of architecture with art, they could start looking at all forms of expression with a close eye. They would only then appreciate and acknowledge expression of human life.

Mumbai Joy: A Critical Reflection

The AOA Vertical studio 2012 "Mumbai Joy" will come to an end tomorrow and we are here, waiting at the college to get all the prints for the exhibition organized. We have about 40 A0 and 8 8' x 4' panels to be printed (it's 12.00 am right now) and the printer has just started printing our sheets. All of us are wondering when will we get the final prints and I am here, sitting with Ajey waiting patiently for our prints to arrive.


Ravindra Punde and Rohit Shinkre were here for some time during the late evening. We couldn't help but get into a self evaluatory, self critical mode. We were discussing about how the Vertical studio turned out to be, although not in much detail. but thoughts keep crossing my mind on this issue and I wonder what I got out of the studio.


I do not really know if the studio has been a success, or even close to success, whether there has been any positive aspect that the student body sees. There were various possibilities and opportunities of learning in the "Mumbai Joy" studio, where we aimed to map cultures of Mumbai. We selected 10 areas of research which included celebrations, films, theatre, food, festivals, gymkhanas, fine arts, crafts, music and cricket. Each group had a team of 20 students and 2-3 faculties. We wished to map Mumbai cultures, a serious, rigorous effort to understand distinct patterns of the city we live in.

I will now begin discussing gaps, lags in communication between the students and the organizing team. Later, I will try locating the problems. Lastly I would try to open up possible strategies for our future operation.

Preparation:
We prepared as faculty. We prepared a final compiled 'intent sheet' with each of these sub groups. In order that student got enough time to decide and choose their area of interest, we floated an e mail, rather an e mail form with the entire description of the exercise along with a registration mail which asked them to choose their first three preferences among the 10 areas. I think we were prepared.

Later, we individually submitted our  methodologies of working and compiled it to understand each others' way of working.

GAPS:
1. It seems that many students assumed the studio to be a workshop where they would be trained in their area of preference.  For example, many in the fine arts group thought they would be involved in the production of paintings and artwork if they registered with this group. Students in the 'crafts' group  thought they would make craft. Some students opted for food since it seemed too playful. This clearly suggested that many students did not read the introduction of each of the sub groups carefully. They did not understand the intent of the studio. They didnot ask for clarifications. We as faculty assumed they understand well.

2. Faculties thought that students would be enthusiastic to channel their energies in their areas of interest and that every student must be able to relate to at least one of these areas. We assumed students would be eager to know more and research on these subjects. It wasn't the case.

3. Vertical studio meant the formulation of groups vertically - across classes. There are two divisions - aided and unaided, in the college and very few students interact. We thought this would be a good opportunity for students across classes to know and learn from each other. However, I found personally that there was hardly any intermingling or strong interaction between them.

4. The 10 groups, we idealized, could work independently. We never thought of overlaps or sharing of information except the Mumbai map.

5. We assumed students to have drive and skill to be able to analyze things around them.

PROBLEMS:
1. There was a clear case of mis-communication in the intent of the studio. We aimed at mapping (document+analyse+represent) and it turned out to be a documentation project.

2. Students had no idea of research. Our fourth year students are no equipped with enough training to accumulate and assort data.

3. Vertical studio groups did not interact vertically. Student groups did not mingle much. Many did not attend, many shuffled. All data remained isolated.

4. Field studies were unsuccessful. Students didnot have methods of observation or any idea of conducting surveys, interviews or taking pictures. They had no clue of "what to document", or what qustions to ask. They remained limited to questionnaires handed by us. There seemed to be very little effort from students to dig out information.

5. I found a serious lack of drive and initiative in the entire groups. No one waited for their panels to be printed and put up. Students had no attachment to their work or no excitement to see their work displayed.

PROBLEM LOCATIONS:
1. We get a large amount of student group highly under-informed and under-confident. Students new to the city, shy students and those coming from non-English backgrounds find it extremely difficult to communicate. I too was an under-informed student and particularly had no skills for architecture, except modelmaking. However, I had the drive.

2. Research has always been assumed to be an activity that is subsidiary and something that is 'all talk', which does not fetch money, and can not fill the stomach. The relation of research to design is seldom explained to students. Further, this gap widens due to over-emphasis on production of designs and drawings.

3. Faculties differ in their schools of thought, but make them personal issues. As mature individuals, we need to appreciate each others' theoretical positions and widen our spectrum of vision. However, the root of the problem lies in faculties pouring in from diverse groups, schools of thought and opinions. Recently, the age divide may be another big reason for the incoherence and intolerance of ideas.

4. Design at Academy is looked at in a very constricted manner. Architecture students are hardly made to (note the assertion) interact with other disciplines that are housed by the same building. Neither do students  capitalize, nor does faculty encourage or force. All remain happy in their own comfort zone.

5. As a corollary to the above point, I believe students can take larger initiatives to bridge these gaps. However, I find students are unmotivated, who see no point in discussing any issues beyond marks, and do not take any step towards making design education well rounded. Neither are they exposed, nor do they want to expose themselves. Internet seems to be a safe hideout and prevents physical exploration of our own city. Generally, the kind of students we are getting seem to be uninterested and hardly care for design. They are here for a degree and want to score good marks.

POSSIBLE TRAJECTORIES:
1. We need serious orientation programmes for students towards architecture and its scope. Further, we need orientation programmes for all sub-disciplines under the purview of the discipline of architecture. Students need to be engaged in the programme of architecture only if they understand and are willing to invest their maximum time in it.

2. Research programmes have to be initiated and they have to be funded well. This will possibly bring in a reassurance in the activity of study through documentation and analysis. There needs to be research method courses at all stages of the architecture course. Examples of research and its practical usage has to be spelled out from the beginning. The fact that research is closely related to pragmatic problems and is a respectable and viable industry has to be established.

3. Faculties may not be selected by word of mouth. They must be rigorously interviewed and their past work  and credentials has to be taken into consideration. They must be qualified and mature enough to teach.

4. Design programmes have to be reworked. Exchange programmes need to be initiated. Interaction between various design institutes must be made compulsory and students should be made to understand other methodologies of working.

5. Counselling for students joining the stream is required. We get a lot of students whose true passion lies somewhere else and due to cultural pressures, end up joining a professional course like architecture which is considered to be the toughest of all courses. We need to admit students based on their motivation levels, not as per their marksheets. The reason why most colleges abroad seem to be successful is because they choose their students. We have no choice. We have to accept what is given to us.

I wish to end this post here. It is a highly personal, narrow and restricted evaluation of the entire situation and much of it may be incorrect. However, it is a documentation of my experience of this entire studio that keeps me agitated enough to not make peace with the system, and thus maintaining my drive. All faculties felt students did not  perform to their capabilities. But the landscape and nature of problems encountered by every one may be different. Thus, the above account may be completely invalid. Also, it is restricted to only 5 points in the framework. There are many other aspects to our non-success. On the other hand, the above points could have been supported with examples or cases - which one intends to skip only to maintain the length of this summary and preserve the integrity of the student.

Overall, it has been an event which has consumed a lot of resource and time to excite a small section of student body which would have taken the extra initiative even otherwise. I believe, it was a greater opportunity for the faculty to understand the diversity of the practice of architecture and to mould their subjects to the specificity of the place they live in. The generic nature of information that the students are fed with meanwhile widens the gap between a student's practice and their immediate context. This further leads to strengthened belief in objectification of architecture.  I hope after reading this post, there would be reactions, and I would be glad to receive them here.

Intelligent v/s the Wise

Looking at smart people I have started observing what makes some smart people different than the other? How does one describe the specificities of different kinds of smart people? The ultimate adjectives, which seem reasonable measures are the intelligent and the wise.

I am a big fan of the wise instead of the intelligent. How does one characterize the two? Through my understanding, here are my distinctions between the two.

Firstly, let me make clear distinction between data and information. Something purely factual (a first hand reading of any situation) is data. It concerns with hard reality. We generate information through collection of data. The study of information creates knowledge. Thus the intelligent are those who are controlled by and in control of knowledge. The intelligent work within set knowledge systems and operate through this understood and accepted system. The intelligent will be able to help you with all kinds of things that exist in the real world. They talk of facts and their synthesis. You can trust them on the authenticity of information. Their skill lies in memorizing and processing the memory to get the right information at the right time. They work exceptionally well within structured environments. These are the people made for the cities – they can impress people and make their way out of situations, through legal and technical knowledge in their respective fields.

However, the intelligent could make mistakes in non-structured environments. They are highly susceptible to fall into traps of incorrect decisions in places where no formal knowledge systems exists. Wading through such field is the expertise of the wise.

It is yet difficult to define if the wise make their way through intelligence. Let’s assume that the wise are intelligent by virtue of their ability to contextualize any kind of data (they do not understand data through knowledge structures). They operate in the field of information, more basely, in the field of data, making their own meanings and readings that are highly contextual to different environments and situations. In this view, the wise are intelligent not because they can memorize all the data, but due to their ability to grasp new data for a particular scenario efficiently and quickly. The wise work with human response and behaviour. In this sense, the difference between the intelligent and the wise is similar to the nature of scalars and vectors respectively – while one is, in essence, quantitative, the other has multiple transforming aspects (like direction, momentum and acceleration) to it which makes it quantitative in the realm of (in  the purview, subset) of qualitative.

The wise are thus able to foresee new knowledge systems / structures and are able to take tactical decisions. Due to their ability to contextualize any kind of information, they are always at their toes and are able to take logical decisions, which bear results for the time being. The wise may not be able to give long term decisions, they may be able to frame a decision that is relevant for the immediate action. In long term, thus, the wise may make mistakes. But also, they may give creative outlooks towards the future. There is a value to this creativity, this leap that the wise takes for the future based on the assumptions of the current. The intelligent may be strategists. They may not conceptualize futures based on current conditions, but imagine new conditions for the future. In doing so, the intelligent miss out on a lot of humour and wit. But the intelligence of their decisions can be harnessed through following their plans.

Another important distinction one can make is the amount of rationality that the intelligent show versus the wise. The intelligent would always have a high level of rationality as compared to the wise since they rely on very safe back up like factual information. The wise use personal logic and bring in a lot of subjectivity to the interpretation of existing data. Also, they rely more on personal experience than objective case studies. While the intelligent would build up a decision based on a range of case studies, the wise would use personal history to give an output.

This post is under construction. It may continue if more ideas occur. Meanwhile, suspended. 

Update

For a long time I have not posted. This is not because I have not been involved in writing. Instead, I am writing all the more. I was very busy writing my personal statement and research proposals for various places. In this process, I had to really really think hard on myself to understand my interests. I think I have achieved a great extent of clarity on my trajectory now. Although it's not completely clear. But every time I think of a new project or research, I clarify my theoretical position. Thus, this process has been quite enriching. For a long time, I thought of uploading all such work on my blog, but I finally refrained, because I just wanted to keep all these things to myself.

On the other hand, I have been manually writing a lot of things - since the computer is a tool which makes me dwell too much on perfection. So i end up losing a lot of ideas. When I write manually, I am not thinking about the correctness of language or the use of words. I mix and match, and mostly I am translating from Hindi to English. So such write ups are really crude. But they help in vomitting a thought out. I take time later to refine them and make these ideas crisper. I have accumulated pages and pages of such text.

There were some other writings which started off really well and were interjected by circumstantial events. The link is lost, and so, once I reconsider them, I will be able to produce a lot more writings at once. Subjects come and go. Strong ideas and thoughts pass across the mind. Sometimes, student work in nascent stage makes me think a lot, and I am able to give a good feedback to a lot. But later, I feel all that thought must be recorded. Lectures must be transcribed. A lot of times, after I finish my lectures, I sit in my room and write what I spoke...It makes so much sense. Students ask questions which help to clarify concepts.

I will take time to collate all such writings and scribblings into tangible output. For the time being, I have made a good compilation of my earlier works into a portfolio, which I really like to gaze at. I keep flipping and feeling the pages and writing all the time. I hope it makes the same impact on others who see it. It's called "Idearchive" - a hint Siddharth (Nadkarny) gave me during an informal chat...

I want to write about the nature in which my phone has gone out of order. It has started behaving weirdly. Being a touch screen, 1/3rd of it has become insensitive. the middle 1/3rd is partially sensitive and the right most part is intact. So I have to constantly be very informed to press at the wrong place to press the right button and execute the right information. For example, the "yes" and "no" button are on right and left on the touch screen. But I end up saying "no" to every thing that occurs with the phone. The key pad types absolutely absurdly. If I have to say, "Sorry to have missed you", it writes "Sorry to have kissed you"! Messages are completely going for a toss!!  It's really funny and I am looking forward to theorize it...How? Imagine a skewed phone - like a man looking crooked, performing unexpected operations and landing you up in imaginary landscapes! One could construct an interesting story out of that! Of all unintended things one did, which opened up a new perspective of life...

Of all "no's" that became "yes" and vice versa. Of all messages that went to wrong people and did interesting connections. Of all unwanted cancellations, of all numbers you dialled wrong...It could be revealing...

I have always imagined such an exercise with archaeological space. When at the Sun temple Modhera, where we saw the intricately carved temple stone blocks numbered and lined up to be reset on the facade, I wondered if all those numbers mixed up, would it change relationships between people? Wouldnt it challenge our whole belief systems, mythology, and all those narratives...An exploratory exercise in challenging history could be fictitiously constructed.

However, there are other things going on. The vertical studio where we have too much to explore and only a few sincere, interested students. I could just indulge in writing about all the 10 areas that have been selected - there are so many stories out there, so much to learn and also produce knowledge. We just have a bunch of extremely lackadaisical students who do not want to do any thing. Either their futures are set, or they do not have futures. It's as black and white as that, perhaps...

I am handling the visual culture group and there is so much to talk about it that I can't contain within myself. I am just waiting for students to bring up some amount of enthusiasm and eagerness to work. Then, I am sure we will achieve something. So, finally, writing is going on. soon you will see a lot of it. It is in the process of cooking up, and it will be served soon. The application process is already over and I can get back to attack this space again!

Academy of Architecture, Annual Lecture 2011-12

Poster Design: Anuj Daga