Great stories are made of great beginnings. They usually begin a long time ago, in a place far far away. This one was no different. It began a little less than five years ago, in one of the many city hamlets, the only one without a train station to its name.
Well maybe, it was slightly different.
Somewhere in the sunshine months of 2006, sixty aspiring architects met in a freshly whitewashed classroom, with low ceiling fans, and even lower standards, with great expectations and greater dreams. Dreams; to build bridges and museums, inserts and installations, and curvilinear walls.
We were young, and stupid, resolved to ultimately just make unresolved matchbox buildings.
But we tried our luck nevertheless.
Fifteen days, and a workshop later, we were ready to face the college, if not the world. Sadly, that didn’t last long, and we were broken down brick by brick, bats and closers, of queens and kings.
The five years hence might have been a rollercoaster ride, with a millions ups and downs, but I am sure none of us could ever have thought of better company, to smuggle glasses of bhang in the Varanasi Ghats, or to break into a cemetery in Hampi, to travel in tam tams, and eat tadgolas in Palghar, or dance in the rains in Matheran, to stand guard in the seedier by lanes of Delhi, to wolf whistle with the Chandigarh boys, or to dream collectively about a missed trip to Rajasthan.
We did everything, make up pretentious cubes that defined us, interpreted songs that probably didn’t have any meaning in the first place, and designed inserts in the zoo, when all that the animals needed was to be set free.
We designed lean to roofs and pitched roofs in the span of one night, and pitched advertisements for hybrid products in pairs to lean on. We cut soap, wood and our hands, and made thermacol versions of windows that would never be used. We measure drew temples, and homes, and a million other things, in times when all what we needed was to measure draw our own lives. We made pairs, and broke them, gossiped and bitched behind closed doors and closed ears. We self taught ourselves the staircase, and drafted each truss at least twice. We glass traced in bulk without getting caught and created auditoriums out of thin air, or our email inboxes. ;)
We created services portfolios overnight, and made concept models in the car.we wrote in CAPS on tracings, with an aim to fill them up, and sometimes we scrawled on a single page in TOS class, while the notebook was forgotten back home.
We forged and gorged, signed and dined as a class, and paid the price, for both. we compared results and designs, We designed for villages that were happy with the way they were, and got a free TV show out of a site visit, we danced and sang our way through fourth year, and ended those memorable nine months from June to January with a maternity hospital. We spent an entire day in the hot sun as punishment, drinking coffee and tea, secretly happy that classes were cancelled for the day, and spent hours in lectures, staring blankly at the blackboard, trying to figure out what the BM diagram actually meant. we photocopied entire notebooks a week before exams, doodles and all, and memorized answers to problems, we sincerely secret Santa-ed every December, and religiously dressed in red, whites and greens.
We trudged through the fifth, battling every riiiight with a wrong, and every fight with a song. And then it was done, the theses were shut, and the folios were folded.
A class that was a class apart, we say civilizations come and go, both, in our history lessons and otherwise. We made them cry, we made them moan. And more than once, we even made them leave. But newer ones came, and “history” repeated itself.
The last five years may seem like a blur, an amalgamation of submissions and juries, but over these years, we have grown, and we have evolved. We came, we saw and finally, after half a decade of torture, we conquered. The academy might not have taught me what architecture is, and I am not even sure whether ill ever know, but it taught me what friendship is, and for that, I thank you. We are the best, from the rest.
For the last five years well spent, class of ’11, this one’s for you.
