post script

forgot to mention in my last post.

got new shelves for my room!
at last.

and they look exactly how I imagined.

notes

Haven't blogged for sometime now. College and laziness.

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I've started using Instagram. 

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SPA just had its annual students' festival, and Delhi Dallying hosted the Delhi Grub Quiz, an informal pop-up event where participants won free food for correctly answering questions on Delhi. The grub in question is the most delicious palak-chole-chawal I have ever been privileged enough to enjoy, sourced from Gole di Haati in Fatehpuri Masjid and packaged in authentic kulhars. Delicious!

Also delicious was our tagline: Know Delhi, Grow Belly!

poster for the event.
not my best effort. in fact, this was just a mock-up try. 

an initial idea was to also serve jalebis. got nixed, though.

The folks at Jobless Studio and Thinking Theorem were kind enough to help us (at the very last minute) with a short teaser video about the quiz. I think it's bloody brilliant, especially considering the fact that it was shot on an ancient point-and-shoot and, when the battery gave up (since we were so ill-prepared), a camera phone. It was shot, processed, the whole shebang, in just a day.

We were also going to call this butter coffee guy we discovered (courtesy the lovely Kriti at Turmeric) but the college ran out of funds. Made a banner for his booth, though. Will put it up later when I can locate the file.

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Also updated my portfolio.

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Won (!) a facebook contest to attend the launch of Anuja Chauhan's latest book. Went with my mom (we've both enjoyed her earlier books), got an autographed copy, gawked at Sonam Kapoor and fell in awe of the awesomeness that is Chauhan. The book was good too, set in 80s Delhi, offered an unusual perspective (for me) to life then. Finished reading Arthashastra, which was both very interesting and very, very, boring. Started India Unbound.

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Volunteered for 2 days of play and learning at the UnBox Festival; helped with set-up, packed for and manned the picnic counter. Attended an URBZ workshop which explored the meaning of rural/urban. Overall, had major fun.


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Been so bleh about college and thesis (thesis!). I've being very complacent and over-confident, almost, thinking that in the end I'll do some crap and not fail. Like I'm satisfied with mediocrity. Did work for this last submission though, so maybe I'm beyond this. Maybe.


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Coming Monday Delhi Dallying is taking a bunch of German architecture students around CP and Barakhamabha Road. This opportunity just came up (a teacher asked us to) and I'm glad because finally we're dallying beyond Shahjahanabad. DD was always supposed to be about more than the Old Ciy but it was just so convenient and familiar. Fingers crossed for our venture into the uncharted.

Transformer

This came by courier today, one of many that come for my dad (a builder/architect). It's an invitation/ poster for (an exorbitantly expensive) design symposium in New Delhi.

At this point I thought it was cheesy. And I was disappointed that the orange colour scheme and triangular grid on the envelope wasn't continued onto the invitation.

But then, I opened it!

It unfolded bit by bit, and surprised me. Pleasantly :)

 I love its design! It's obviously not just done on the computer, but must have required manual experimentation. I love how it's been folded crisply at all the right places, how its economical because it's only printed on one side. Most of all, I love how it makes sense at every stage and when it fully opens up. 

Seminar

I've ranted enough about work this year. Now onto some fun work stuff.

The final year students of Bachelors of Architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, host a series of seminars every year. These seminars are public and are aimed at generating interest and discussion on contemporary architectural theory and practice.

Seminar Week is finally upon us and I was one of the few who volunteered to make the posters and invitations. A few discussions, many hours on adobe creative suite, a few less at Nehru Place, and here's the end product:

the poster

invitation (front)

invitation (back)

Also worked on the official blog. Had to make some more graphics for it. We chose two speech bubbles as our icon and the tagline (QUESTION. THINK. TALK.) because we wanted to emphasize that these seminars are about discussion.

This here the poster for our own seminar (Seminar 2/ By the People):

The idea was to make the poster represent a window into Shahjahanabad (or other such seemingly chaotic settlements). Rohan also worked on this brilliant video as an introduction to our seminar:

Hello World!

Final year of architecture school is brutal.

Our main projects -Urban Design and Seminar- are both in large groups (four and five, respectively) and it's really, really hard to reach consensus on anything. I'm always working, staying over at someone or the other's place. Even when we work at my place, I'm still with these guys. 24x7. There's no real break. And when we all get frustrated and take some time off, we're definitely doing it at the expense of work. The schedule is grueling, one submission after another, with no space in between to contemplate on your design or discussions. Studio is majorly frustrating, and our faculty seems particularly unreceptive and uncompassionate.

I feel as if I'm always ranting/ complaining, whether to friends, family, and now, cyberspace. 

This can not be it.

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Delhi Dallying made its first series of posters (see here) and organized its first walk. Yet to write about them.

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What I've been reading:
Delhi: Lights, Shades and Shadows

Flatland

Suri's Burn Book

Twilight in Delhi

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Our seminar involves a detailed study of the mohallas of Shahjahanabad. We try to go every week and we've made some pretty good contacts in the old city. People are generally quite open and friendly; my (unvoiced) perception of an apathetic and too-fast-paced world is changing.

Reverting to cliche, the old city provides countless moments of pure aesthetic and experiential joy. I haven't captured many of them (they are so clear in my mind: surreal barber shops, the play of light and shadow, the setting sun, wind in my hair, the thrill of kites, the food), but some I share here. For some amazing photographs, visit here, here, and the end bits of here.

garbage

haveli khazanchi, off of dariba.

every corner chaiwallah 

the lime green building on ballimaran, a landmark for us

meena bazar

patangbaazi

the sky on independence day

ballimaran

the mohalla of a dhobhi community in chatta shahji

my favourite find, jama masjid

printing press, chatta shahji

context and all that

Michael Bierut, over at his blog:

All of this is compounded by the fact that designers themselves have very little faith in context. We too want the quick hit, the clever idea that will sell itself in the meeting and, even better, jump off the table in design competitions. More than anything, we want to proffer the promise of control: the control of communication, the control of meaning. To admit the truth — that so much is out of our hands — marginalizes our power to the point where it seems positively self-destructive.

This was in respect to graphic and logo design, but is true EVERYWHERE. Whenever we do a new architectural design studio project of a sufficiently large scale, I'm always wondering - will our well meaning intentions ever become reality (assuming we're designing in a hypothetically real situation and all that)? When we did inclusive housing last semester the open-endedness of this question was a GREAT frustration. Nothing exists in isolation, and we can't always predict how people will react, respond and adapt- even the greatest social scientists aren't always right. All the reading I've been doing for our seminar on complex adaptive social systems has merely reinforced this belief.

God, designers have to think through so many possibilities- and industrial designers and architects probably have it worst, considering the shear scale of their products their decisions affect a ginormous number of people. Shit.

you get the point, don't you?

Poor tota

Injured parrot Prashant rescued from our office lawn. And no sooner had we secured it in the box, the local mongoose -who's always running around- came out of his hiding place and started sniffing around and even climbing into the box! Nature's cruel :(

Then we had to put the box higher up, out of reach.

Update!

10 minutes after I took these photos, Mansi came back from Green Park and decided to meet the tota. She opened the box, and the parrot just flew out! Yay. I'm trying not to think about it falling somewhere else and actually being eaten up.