The National Association of Students of Architecture, India (NASA), is one of the largest student-driven associations of architecture across the world that has been bringing together more than 200 schools of architecture that has grown to that number over the period of three decades. In 2006 when I had first attended NASA as a participant from Academy of Architecture for the HUDCO trophy (which we also won), I had left with a mixed impression of hope and despair. Confused between competition and festival, the event seemed like a lost opportunity to my young critical mind, and we never turned back to participate in the event.
Years later, I was invited as a speaker to the event of the 68th Annual NASA Convention at the Woxsen University. Despite strong reservations, I signed up to see what shape it had taken over the years, and more specifically, how it appeared from "the other side" of things. However, having organized countless events over the last 12 years, and from a more intimate understanding of the archi-pedagogical landscape of the country, I had way more empathy for the entire endeavour now. To pull of this event with more than a 100 colleges, the scales of coordination, the complexities of programming, the management of resources and promise of coming back year after year - with only student energies - must not be an easy feat.
This is not to say that NASA could still be looked up for its intellectual contribution. But in moderating a single seminar session and delivering a talk to a room filled with more than 150 students from all across South Asia - I could sense the immense potential that could inform the pedagogical landscape of the country. What the queues of young people waiting to enter our rooms told me was their hunger to connect, reach out and access people who could help them take their questions further, who could open their trajectories beyond their limited intellectual resources within the smaller towns. How do students studying in smaller towns and universities get to meet thinkers and professionals from fields that are otherwise available only within larger schools or prominent universities who can afford them? How do students wanting to explore alternative trajectories in architecture and education find outlets beyond the confines of their archaic intellectual infrastructures.
NASA is then, an opportunity for all these students from cities small and big, across South Asia, to equalise and connect. Over the four days, architecture students not only present the work they produce for the various competitions - that have themselves expanded and attuned to the times (to include journalism, films, and so on), but they also participate in workshops, talks, meets, and in general meet possible future colleagues. A lot often gets lost in the conundrum of scale and organisation of the event, but then, I realised that there is so much that could happen in the coming together of about 60,000 students of architecture in a single space! I am sure some of these students still make life long friends - like I made in 2006 with students of CEPT - who had for the first time introduced some of us visiting to the Kurula Varkey Design Forum - that we attended in 2007, moderated by the likes of Juhaani Palasmaa - whom none of us knew! I felt a strange sense of responsibility now, as I spoke to the young students who held me after my talk to discuss their dilemmas and some who took pictures with me almost making me a celebrity... But precisely that feeling of how sharing your trajectory could become so meaningful for someone who has been searching a resonant voice, was so rewarding...
Sometimes, we take our privilege for granted. I grew up in Mumbai - big city, best schools, intellectual life, resourceful space, access to best minds...I had everything at my disposal, and I have taken advantage of all of it too. Having toured to many smaller towns to teach, discuss and share ideas over the last decade, I realise that such big-city exposure produces a worldliness that feeds into one's work almost naturally, and it is also precisely the world from where other spaces seem like they are "yet to catch up". We cannot simply dismiss this argument to the democratic availability of intellectual resource to media. The catching up will happen only if there is a window to look beyond, and the windows shall open only if they are made in the first place. How do we think of equalising education, and expecting intellectual conversation if in the first place, people do not have access to the same resources?
I think I was humbled off my intellectual snobbery and despite all the problems of NASA that still remain, it is commendable that they continue to do it year after year. These days, my Instagram doom-scroll brings me time and again to this one particular enterprise where a seemingly native individual in the forest across a water source will dig up the soil from the riverbank and then keep sieving it for hours in flowing water - only to collect a tiny, miniscule amount of gold. The event of NASA is such a mixture of promise and hope - of assurance and aspiration. In bringing naiive, young minds together, I am sure they pull up some capacities for some people. In raising this horizon of hope, the event must maintain its quest to keep sharpening and raising its ambition for more people across the subcontinent to become a community of people who must hope.
