an article for the dep. magazine

a r c h i

well i promised her(the magazine secy) i would complete one before i leave for home.
but i had no clue to what would it actually be?
architecture?? naah! may be i should write on something I am good at..but then it wont find a place in the magazine, hence a waste of talent!
may be i can put down in a few true words how i feel about everything that were the last five years. i call it the plunder years. Learning architecture made me realize the real study starts once you are out of college. I can very well say that because I learned stuff only when i saw them, the structures, the building systems and the processes happening and not when they were in print. Books never fascinated me, but the photographs in them did. they inspired me. I recall the day when i was told that designing a space needs pure logic, a case study and a touch of you. well the touch of me was what i had been loking for until i found out it was too late. I graduated. and it is now that i realize that there are many like me who suffer this lack of identity in their work. may be it was the lack of a few courses on the basic architectural theories, the various schools of thought(if they ever existed), their history and impact. Out of the odd 60 subjects taught to us most of which started with the basics and ended when the end sems came, i could have afforded a few which would give me my identity as an architect.

on a lighter note about life here, i could have been a sportsperson.you must know how it feels to be a part of the basketball team.it feels gr8. or may be i could have learned to play the guitar, stretched a few chords until i was noticed, girls around me(would have felt great).what if i could learn swimming, my evenings would be glorious then; instead of the lonely walks or the sweet nothings at tikkas with friends.
well this is the part i call fantasy, but the real me, the real world around me was full of like minded archi guys. we talked a lot, so there was confusion but there was a lot of merry making too. those were the days when we had so much to do, so much to speak about almost everything knowing the fact we actually knew little. even now i have no clue to what architecture is..ask me to define it and i will have to think a lot and try hard not to use those fillers, words which mean nothing but are used only to convince you that you are dealing with something complex.

Then with time we grew into what we are today, still confused, still trying to know of things about life and architecture. the only difference is that we are no more together.so it will be hard to find patient listeners or for that matter, active protestors.
Another thought, a selfish one, people might even call it ugly but its true. I shall put it this way: first a question to my fellow depmates; dont you find it hard to connect with people outside kgp? dont you think we are no more normal or appreciative of the ways of junta outside this place. has this place changed us so much? and then a question to everybody else: why this awe? are we odd?
sometime back i got an answer to my question. when in life you find out that your near and dear ones are the others we just talked about, and that you will live with them happily ever after, you will come out of it. afterall 5 yrs in a life of 75(i aim to live long like the other architects)wouldn't make much of a difference. but it already has. although i feel just like we adapted ourselves to this place our alma mater, we would to life too. no worries!

best of luck to all my depmates.
make a difference to everything you can because i know we have things in common.[:)]