I was invited to a student run initiative 'Vartalaap' (eng: Conversation) organized at the Academy of Architecture today. Vartalaap demands the invitees to talk on a subject of their choice after which students can have a discussion with them. I was together in a session with Chaitanya Karnik for this vartalaap. I have never come across a situation where an audience is ready to listen to whatever I wanted to talk about. This invitation left me in some serious thought on what I would have to tell the world if given a podium for 30 minutes?
A few days back in an academic council meeting at SEA, I had the opportunity of meeting a number of intellectuals, practitioners and academicians from different disciplines - most of them quite noted in their own fields. In this gathering was also a film maker Madhushree Dutta, whom I have passingly known (and so has she known me passingly). Over a round of drinks she went on to narrate her initial journey into the larger arena of cultural politics, and how funding for art projects is often secured. Madhushree recalled a meeting with an organization as large as the UN where prominent people from different fields were invited and asked for what they would like to do (or so is what I remember). At that time, being a young film maker still finding her way through the cultural landscape in India, Madhu felt quite lost. She asked to herself, "Madhu, if someone asks you to talk on any topic of your choice, what will you talk?" She further asked herself, "You don't have any thing to say, to tell the world?" (quotes are not verbatim) Madhu certainly lost a great opportunity, but this piece of her experience held much importance for me. The above incident happened in Madhu's life more that 20 years ago. Recently she has been invited to be on the jury panel for documentary films that will be presented in the Venice Bienalle 2015. It's quite an honour, and Madhu was very happy too, to have traveled thus far in her professional journey.
When I was invited for Vartaalaap I faced a similar dilemma. Ofcourse this talk was not organized by any mega institution, but the pressure to think of a subject that I would have liked to talk about kept me wondering through out the week, to the effect that I demanded the organizing team to define a theme. Thoughts similar to those of Madhu's ran in my head - I wondered if I really had any thing to talk, to share? Rather, I questioned, "Don't I have any thing to talk?"
While I decided to recite a chapter of my master's thesis finally, today was a bigger relief. Chaitanya had put together a presentation last night for this session. He gave an elaborate presentation, in precise answer to the question of what after all would he have to say on the subject of architecture after his years of engagement with the very profession.
Chaitanya is an idealist, and his talk was constructed from the stand point of an idealist. He argued on what must one think like, recalling Plato, Vitruvius as well as Corbusier and their tryst with idea versus reality. Chaitanya has lectured on a similar subject with the same anecdotes to many students in the past, and I have been fortunate to have witnessed his lectures on theory of design before. The sheer energy and assertion with which he places his point is enthusiastic, and the listener is quite likely to be mesmerized by the world he creates through his passionate words. Chaitanya believes in purity - of language, expression and architecture. He has excellent command over several languages - he never mixes Hindi with English, or Bengali with Marathi - all are languages known to him personally, along with his investment in Sanskrit. He believes that everything that is true of language is true of architecture. Grammar, structure, meaning and communication - all occur when creating architecture - it is ordered. Rather, it has to be ordered.
Reeling through examples of artists and architects like Isamu Noguchi, Zaha Hadid, Le Corbusier, Gunther Uecker or traditional examples like the English Gardens or the Japanese buildings, he evoked that architecture demands perfection. Chaitanya eulogized about the personalities that the discipline of architecture celebrates too. His focus thus was on building a character, a personality one must be in order to be able to produce a piece of architecture, that leaves behind an idea, that lives much beyond a persons life. Even in the past, Chaitanya has held in his opinion that one's work is not separate from oneself. One's work is one's life and vice versa. "Our job today," he went on to say, "is to create ideas and ways to build ideas."
There were several beautiful anecdotes and comparisons from literature, sculpture, poetry and philosophy that he shared over the entire lecture, which are hard to note now, because I haven't had the chance to record them. However, intermittently he spoke of some examples like Benares, and also ended with an image showing a man on the ghats of Ganga bathing, backed by his own child perhaps, who aided to rub his back.
Chaitanya's passionate talk created a space of idealism in the room which I was hesitant to dismantle. Hesitant because I have experienced the power of idealism and also because I wanted the students to feel it so that they are energized. After all, if there is any space you can practice idealism, it is the academia. Also, idealism according to me is best employed as an academic project, or one can call it a philosophical project. It is with skepticism that I entered the conversation. Positioning myself to not be invested much in the idea of idealism any longer and to be someone who has taken to cultural mapping, I interpreted Chaitanya's notion of idealism to be top down - one that decides the ideal and works out a way to achieve it.
Within this, Chaitanya introduced personalities of two kinds, both which have different methods of deciphering the same knowledge, or truth (about the self, or the world). One is the believer and the other is the skeptic. He mentioned both as valid modes of moving towards giving birth to an idea, but personally held the position of the believer - he who believes, for example, that there exists God, there exists truth, there exists the possibility of manifesting the ideal. I seemed to hold the other extreme - that of the skeptic - that of the non-believer, the one who doubts, one who is unsure, ambiguous, although not dismissing the idea of perfection, rather interrogating it. However, both the believer and the skeptic, he said lead to the same point - whose paths are like the two opposite faces of a pyramid leading the the singular tip. The commonality between both personalities is their struggle to move towards the perfect - one is moving because he knows, the other is moving because he has to find, but towards the same goal.
The beauty of this conversation lay in the harmonious agreement of disagreements. Our comfort with each other's occasional diametrically opposite points of view did not bother each other, rather our logic of arrivals to a conclusion were clear. It also seemed that the path of belief as well as disbelief worked respectively for each of us. To simply state an example, if he believed, for instance, "God is there", I merely asked "Is God not there?" Both struggled to perhaps achieve that truth. But drives our search is the belief or disbelief respectively.
Such was the nature of today's conversation. I am hoping that there is some record that students have made of the talk by Chaitanya, for his examples were deep and beautiful.
I personally felt that the setting of vartalaap could have been different to have more interaction, it became more of a lecture rather than a conversation. For a conversation, however, both sides have to be equally prepared. Still, sometimes it is pure joy to see someone so deeply engaged in conversation with the self. In this spirit, I skipped my talk and let the audience float in the ideal space Chaitanya created for all of us.
A few days back in an academic council meeting at SEA, I had the opportunity of meeting a number of intellectuals, practitioners and academicians from different disciplines - most of them quite noted in their own fields. In this gathering was also a film maker Madhushree Dutta, whom I have passingly known (and so has she known me passingly). Over a round of drinks she went on to narrate her initial journey into the larger arena of cultural politics, and how funding for art projects is often secured. Madhushree recalled a meeting with an organization as large as the UN where prominent people from different fields were invited and asked for what they would like to do (or so is what I remember). At that time, being a young film maker still finding her way through the cultural landscape in India, Madhu felt quite lost. She asked to herself, "Madhu, if someone asks you to talk on any topic of your choice, what will you talk?" She further asked herself, "You don't have any thing to say, to tell the world?" (quotes are not verbatim) Madhu certainly lost a great opportunity, but this piece of her experience held much importance for me. The above incident happened in Madhu's life more that 20 years ago. Recently she has been invited to be on the jury panel for documentary films that will be presented in the Venice Bienalle 2015. It's quite an honour, and Madhu was very happy too, to have traveled thus far in her professional journey.
When I was invited for Vartaalaap I faced a similar dilemma. Ofcourse this talk was not organized by any mega institution, but the pressure to think of a subject that I would have liked to talk about kept me wondering through out the week, to the effect that I demanded the organizing team to define a theme. Thoughts similar to those of Madhu's ran in my head - I wondered if I really had any thing to talk, to share? Rather, I questioned, "Don't I have any thing to talk?"
While I decided to recite a chapter of my master's thesis finally, today was a bigger relief. Chaitanya had put together a presentation last night for this session. He gave an elaborate presentation, in precise answer to the question of what after all would he have to say on the subject of architecture after his years of engagement with the very profession.
Chaitanya is an idealist, and his talk was constructed from the stand point of an idealist. He argued on what must one think like, recalling Plato, Vitruvius as well as Corbusier and their tryst with idea versus reality. Chaitanya has lectured on a similar subject with the same anecdotes to many students in the past, and I have been fortunate to have witnessed his lectures on theory of design before. The sheer energy and assertion with which he places his point is enthusiastic, and the listener is quite likely to be mesmerized by the world he creates through his passionate words. Chaitanya believes in purity - of language, expression and architecture. He has excellent command over several languages - he never mixes Hindi with English, or Bengali with Marathi - all are languages known to him personally, along with his investment in Sanskrit. He believes that everything that is true of language is true of architecture. Grammar, structure, meaning and communication - all occur when creating architecture - it is ordered. Rather, it has to be ordered.
Reeling through examples of artists and architects like Isamu Noguchi, Zaha Hadid, Le Corbusier, Gunther Uecker or traditional examples like the English Gardens or the Japanese buildings, he evoked that architecture demands perfection. Chaitanya eulogized about the personalities that the discipline of architecture celebrates too. His focus thus was on building a character, a personality one must be in order to be able to produce a piece of architecture, that leaves behind an idea, that lives much beyond a persons life. Even in the past, Chaitanya has held in his opinion that one's work is not separate from oneself. One's work is one's life and vice versa. "Our job today," he went on to say, "is to create ideas and ways to build ideas."
There were several beautiful anecdotes and comparisons from literature, sculpture, poetry and philosophy that he shared over the entire lecture, which are hard to note now, because I haven't had the chance to record them. However, intermittently he spoke of some examples like Benares, and also ended with an image showing a man on the ghats of Ganga bathing, backed by his own child perhaps, who aided to rub his back.
Chaitanya's passionate talk created a space of idealism in the room which I was hesitant to dismantle. Hesitant because I have experienced the power of idealism and also because I wanted the students to feel it so that they are energized. After all, if there is any space you can practice idealism, it is the academia. Also, idealism according to me is best employed as an academic project, or one can call it a philosophical project. It is with skepticism that I entered the conversation. Positioning myself to not be invested much in the idea of idealism any longer and to be someone who has taken to cultural mapping, I interpreted Chaitanya's notion of idealism to be top down - one that decides the ideal and works out a way to achieve it.
Within this, Chaitanya introduced personalities of two kinds, both which have different methods of deciphering the same knowledge, or truth (about the self, or the world). One is the believer and the other is the skeptic. He mentioned both as valid modes of moving towards giving birth to an idea, but personally held the position of the believer - he who believes, for example, that there exists God, there exists truth, there exists the possibility of manifesting the ideal. I seemed to hold the other extreme - that of the skeptic - that of the non-believer, the one who doubts, one who is unsure, ambiguous, although not dismissing the idea of perfection, rather interrogating it. However, both the believer and the skeptic, he said lead to the same point - whose paths are like the two opposite faces of a pyramid leading the the singular tip. The commonality between both personalities is their struggle to move towards the perfect - one is moving because he knows, the other is moving because he has to find, but towards the same goal.
The beauty of this conversation lay in the harmonious agreement of disagreements. Our comfort with each other's occasional diametrically opposite points of view did not bother each other, rather our logic of arrivals to a conclusion were clear. It also seemed that the path of belief as well as disbelief worked respectively for each of us. To simply state an example, if he believed, for instance, "God is there", I merely asked "Is God not there?" Both struggled to perhaps achieve that truth. But drives our search is the belief or disbelief respectively.
Such was the nature of today's conversation. I am hoping that there is some record that students have made of the talk by Chaitanya, for his examples were deep and beautiful.
I personally felt that the setting of vartalaap could have been different to have more interaction, it became more of a lecture rather than a conversation. For a conversation, however, both sides have to be equally prepared. Still, sometimes it is pure joy to see someone so deeply engaged in conversation with the self. In this spirit, I skipped my talk and let the audience float in the ideal space Chaitanya created for all of us.
