B. ARCH – BEING ARCHITECT

     

“Why are you wasting your time here? Go to your home &pursue some other career (kheti veti karo ghar jaake)“  these were the encouraging words of “THE DIRECTOR” of our department on my second day of college for not adhering to the norms of having all kinds of squares (T’s, set’s..) with me. But everybody faces those rough patches at starting days in college & from that day on my journey has been quite eventful, as smooth as a barbed wire. Sarcastic & pinching comments or one can say prejudices like “you are not fit for architecture or you don’t know even this by the end of first semester?” have kept my mind busy. It would be wrong if I say that it’s all bad times here, it gets worse. And those times are jury times.

 Though it is not bad for everyone, if you have absolutely bursting sheets and good rendering abilities, juror might even want to incorporate your design elements in his own works, no matter how much waste spaces you have. It never happened to me though, as I never fulfilled the criteria of jam-packed sheets & good rendering. There is every possibility that this is pure envy speaking out of me. Still, when you are over with jury, it is the same feeling a poor peasant gets when he marries off his seventh daughter. Yes, we people do share the same amount of pressure, responsibility & burden. But at the end of a semester we have a proof of our hard labour work, we have our SHEETS. Sheets which are the closest companion of an architectural student, one might give up his girlfriend to someone but never his sheet. They are one of the few things which we cherish in our student life. Yes for sure there are ‘few’.

Site visits & educational trips (they seldom involve any site analysis or education) are surely memorable. Then there is NASA convention, which I can say without any second thought is unsurpassed among all school/college trips. Competitions, events, trophies, rock bands, D.J’s colleges from every part of the country and sometimes even outside & pretty & good people of those colleges make this experience one of a lifetime. Another thing that fills your heart with immense joy is when the date of submission postpones right in the class, when you are literally doing anything on butter sheet to merely fill them & pretending the reason for your incomplete submission is the hard work done behind evolving concept. But the most joyous moment(academically speaking)  is when you get a ‘good work’ remark on your sheet after a night out(in architecture ‘night out’ means drafting a sheet for the whole night, with a severe effect on your eyes & back), which i must tell you seldom happens. But after the same night out when you get a ‘repeat’ & on that sheet you just feel like rolling up that sheet  giving it to that faculty for its apt usage(in short ‘batti banaake....’). There is every possibility of a nervous breakdown when you get a B.C. sheet repeat or your design gets rejected. But, we ‘archies’ as a creed have somehow unimaginably strong hearts and central nervous systems, which still keep on going.

There is a very famous line, “rejection is an important part of life” & I am damn sure measure of its importance & occurrence is nowhere more than in an architectural student’s life. The most ironic rejection we have to face is when not your planning but your concept doesn’t excites design faculty & you are told to think something different, something like, thinking with their minds. To tackle this problem, you need some philosophical hint in your concepts & a good vocabulary to boost it. With your heavy words & your sensitivity towards global warming, energy conservation, socio-economical problems & issues that your designs cannot help even 0.001%, some people might think “he/she is too good for this place”. Again this could be the envious part of my mind which creates my concepts, as most of my ‘great concepts’ are generally mocked upon by faculty.

But you should just stick up to your ideas as long as you believe in them, because everything happened positive or negative, good or bad, called for or uncalled for, in these past four years have pushed me towards the title “AR.” Whatever said or done to me was fair or unfair, nobody can judge accurately, but i have realised one thing that architecture is worth all this & nothing of this stuff will bother you if you will remember one thing that ‘your thoughts are your biggest challenge & you yourself are your biggest competitor’.