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we were exploring the reason for how the success rate of arranged marriages has reduced drastically in comparison to earlier generations. Divorce was a taboo word till very very recent times. incompatibility was never a consideration. the initial system was, everyone lived together no individual egos to play with no personal space. packed like sardines in a can stacked for transport. there was nothing called compatibility. the purpose of marriage was procreation and supporting the larger family. marriages was for progression of the family size. you have 3 daughters and 4 sons, i have 3 daughters lets talk business .. that kinda thing , all match making happened through word of mouth. there were these matchmakers who came later into the picture but even they were only well connected individuals who know people and so as long as the families were compatible it all worked out for everybody. then we exploded as a population, you couldn't have individuals that well connected families became smaller the largest having 3 kids.. individuality bred like crazy.. they still thought an arranged marriage would work if we got them on a common platform and this led to the advent of the matrimony sites. single male in bangalore seeks girl :: single female in delhi seeks male.. bingo! no past no present accounted for .. marry and merry. but the idea is bombing. individuals are literally jump into the sack with no prior knowledge of each other. and then what? the girl has to live with the guys appetite for death metal and he has to put up with her addiction of mush.. and sometimes it could be worse if the girl has a thing for death metal and the guy for mush!!!! i know guys who still cant decide with their girlfriends of 3 years if she's the one, and here we are expecting people to live off the rest o their lives with someone who you barely know for the last month and a half and is putting his best foot forth. kinda difficult to envision success. i think we are making the transition from the society moving from a unit driven individual to a individual as a unit.
as an architect we studied stone buildings and how they were actually mocking wood structures. Then i thought that how is it that we ran out of ideas then to actually not develop details in stone indigenously and ape age old systems of buildings. but then we were silenced by the whole what will be has always been and how it is actually the same principle that construction follows and hence the similarity in design and detailing. plus there is a similarity in the structural behavior of stone and wood. but then hundreds of years later we started to mock stone buildings. and we got good at it. we aped the aped better than ever before. we made cement look like stone , slurry look like marble. we have even got to a point of making one type of stone look like another, cement look like wood, plastic look like glass concrete to look like wood. its like somehow we hate the original nature of things and are always looking to change them to ape something else entirely. Most that i have talked to have called it progress and how they are trying to better present materials to relive the glory of the items of the past. its not only true for architectural design. its also true for vehicles. you hear of people spending millions on old school bikes with new age electronically triggered engines.people customizing their new bentleys with old school suicide doors. our parliamentary buildings ape the traditional designs of years bygone. we have a hard time getting to the point of moving on and when we do we have already moved to a newer past that we are nostalgic about. this is the nature of man as i see it and this to me is the essence of all design. louis khan was right "what will be has always been" it doesn't meant that we have invented all that was worth inventing. it means that we always will look back and the the future to somehow be a commemorative of the future. we made alarm clocks to praise the lord. we made lamps of LEDs to make them look like oil burning ones. we make digital microphones to look like old school microphones. we have telephones to look like old time instruments. there has to be something that makes us want to live in the past all the time. and we get good at it. our stone work is impeccable, we have mastered moulded plastics, concrete as a fluid material, metal also contributes to our fascination with the past. but is this how deign progresses? retro for the future?
1. would it help if the money we spend on videos to make poverty history was spent on making poverty history...?
2. is it discomforting that sham.poo means a shit scam?
3. why is it that when you sit down to write that questions that bother you so much nothing comes to your mind?
4. still to come!
2. is it discomforting that sham.poo means a shit scam?
3. why is it that when you sit down to write that questions that bother you so much nothing comes to your mind?
4. still to come!
how is it that one city in a country is more intimate and less connected and another one less than a couple of hundred miles away seems less intimate and more connected. how is it that certain cities appear really distant and impersonal at a level have well established networks that make communication and information exchange easy. where as certain cities are very intimate in their scale and structure but very disconnected in existence? is it something to with the people who live there? or the development of the city from its past to now.....
lets map the growth of these cities. bangalore came up in the last 10 years or less from a sleepy small town to this monstrous urban sprawl with an unprecedented growth rate. a major chunk of the cities population is immigrant worker in the service and IT and most of these here are between the age group of 25-40. it is a young city with immense infrastructure at their disposal but with limited land available. the public events are far and few the social instances are limited to a few concerts an performances every month. no public gathering space in the city that is functioning to its desired capacity. even nature is against it. no hills around it no beaches where people could gather around and engage in any sort of community activity. prices are high and opportunities aplenty. but people on person seem disconnected. they move about without even a flick of recognition. boundaries drawn firmly around houses, curfews strict. the sleeps early rises late. i have friends here who have a 8 pm deadline (just to give you a yard stick: back home in pune i would leave home at 10 in the night to meet friends and hang around doing nothing till 2-3 in the morning without hinter and geographically and historically we share similarities with bangalore.)
but everyone here knows everyone. they connect on the internet. they still stay in touch through non-intimate modes of communication. voice/text/electronic any means necessary. they interact, they communicate. you do something on this end of the city and people in the other end of the city know of it. it is transparent beyond my understanding. you start something today, an by the afternoon everyone knows.
chennai has had a more stable growth rate. its still spawned from a capital city before independence, the struggle for independence has left more violent scars on the city, its has a smaller immigrant population in comparison to city one but has a larger industrial growth. education is more of a business here in comparison to the earlier city under question. there are music festivals, the corner teashops the small businesses with the local grocery store selling everything form greens to phone recharges. the coast line is always crowded with people gathering there for food, or fun. the city sleps late and rises early. but news travels slow. for any one to establish them selves as a formidable entity it can take years of work. you could swindle half the town and people wouldn't take notice unless you have gone through a considerable chunk of the population.
why the contrast? what keeps the connection distant. why does new travel faster in one place and in the other it just doesn't move? both cities have seen a boom in the last few years and both have been influenced by the dot come boom and bust. what is it about people that makes them connect and disconnect?
the possible answers are aplenty. literacy, exploration of communication avenues. the number of locals that move to the west, immigrant population, city size, general social structure,
damned if i knew.
lets map the growth of these cities. bangalore came up in the last 10 years or less from a sleepy small town to this monstrous urban sprawl with an unprecedented growth rate. a major chunk of the cities population is immigrant worker in the service and IT and most of these here are between the age group of 25-40. it is a young city with immense infrastructure at their disposal but with limited land available. the public events are far and few the social instances are limited to a few concerts an performances every month. no public gathering space in the city that is functioning to its desired capacity. even nature is against it. no hills around it no beaches where people could gather around and engage in any sort of community activity. prices are high and opportunities aplenty. but people on person seem disconnected. they move about without even a flick of recognition. boundaries drawn firmly around houses, curfews strict. the sleeps early rises late. i have friends here who have a 8 pm deadline (just to give you a yard stick: back home in pune i would leave home at 10 in the night to meet friends and hang around doing nothing till 2-3 in the morning without hinter and geographically and historically we share similarities with bangalore.)
but everyone here knows everyone. they connect on the internet. they still stay in touch through non-intimate modes of communication. voice/text/electronic any means necessary. they interact, they communicate. you do something on this end of the city and people in the other end of the city know of it. it is transparent beyond my understanding. you start something today, an by the afternoon everyone knows.
chennai has had a more stable growth rate. its still spawned from a capital city before independence, the struggle for independence has left more violent scars on the city, its has a smaller immigrant population in comparison to city one but has a larger industrial growth. education is more of a business here in comparison to the earlier city under question. there are music festivals, the corner teashops the small businesses with the local grocery store selling everything form greens to phone recharges. the coast line is always crowded with people gathering there for food, or fun. the city sleps late and rises early. but news travels slow. for any one to establish them selves as a formidable entity it can take years of work. you could swindle half the town and people wouldn't take notice unless you have gone through a considerable chunk of the population.
why the contrast? what keeps the connection distant. why does new travel faster in one place and in the other it just doesn't move? both cities have seen a boom in the last few years and both have been influenced by the dot come boom and bust. what is it about people that makes them connect and disconnect?
the possible answers are aplenty. literacy, exploration of communication avenues. the number of locals that move to the west, immigrant population, city size, general social structure,
damned if i knew.
we are all meant to die!
did the dinosaurs not try to avoid extinction?did they also call in the conservation and environmental designer and get their lives reorganised to last a few years longer? if we were meant to preserve ourselves for ever wouldn't nature have given us a way to do so already? the question is all these methods of conservation that we are so fondly advocating are against the natural course of existence...!
we have already started screwing the planet over by increasing the life expectancy of man by a few years. infant mortality rate has also gone down by a considerable amount, we are eliminating more and more diseases each year... you call this progress right? if nature was writing a dictionary.. this would be listed under infestation.according to nature... we gotta eat, gotta sleep and eventually gotta die.. we are screwing with the survival of the fittest theory people! we don't let the old die and we don't stop the new from coming... so we grow and grow, and grow..... until there is no more to grow into!!!! and then we plan to move to the moon, mars, and beyond.. until when?
we are destined to die.. this party is almost over.. pack your bags and leave dorothy cos kansas is going bye bye! the sooner we come to terms with it the better it is for us.. let nature take its own course and we may go further.. we try to alter natures course. and there is justice in this world in a way that we wish there wasn't. solution.. no prayer for the dying, kill the kids and bring your daughter to the slaughter. :) kidding.. i don't know what to do... i only got this far...!
did the dinosaurs not try to avoid extinction?did they also call in the conservation and environmental designer and get their lives reorganised to last a few years longer? if we were meant to preserve ourselves for ever wouldn't nature have given us a way to do so already? the question is all these methods of conservation that we are so fondly advocating are against the natural course of existence...!
we have already started screwing the planet over by increasing the life expectancy of man by a few years. infant mortality rate has also gone down by a considerable amount, we are eliminating more and more diseases each year... you call this progress right? if nature was writing a dictionary.. this would be listed under infestation.according to nature... we gotta eat, gotta sleep and eventually gotta die.. we are screwing with the survival of the fittest theory people! we don't let the old die and we don't stop the new from coming... so we grow and grow, and grow..... until there is no more to grow into!!!! and then we plan to move to the moon, mars, and beyond.. until when?
we are destined to die.. this party is almost over.. pack your bags and leave dorothy cos kansas is going bye bye! the sooner we come to terms with it the better it is for us.. let nature take its own course and we may go further.. we try to alter natures course. and there is justice in this world in a way that we wish there wasn't. solution.. no prayer for the dying, kill the kids and bring your daughter to the slaughter. :) kidding.. i don't know what to do... i only got this far...!
design studios = multi-cusine restaurants?over the years people considered architect who have in house structural designers and contractors to be the way design to progress.the restaurant case study, vertically divided with a impermeable distinction, multiple chefs cooking their specialty cuisine without borrowing any influences from the others cooking around him. or him the rest dont exist as he has nothing to learn from them or teach them.
design studios=lalapalooza over the last couple of years it as begun to dawn upon us that design has jumped the gun, and has moved on to a larger umbrella of design verticals, architecture depending on artists to add excellence to their work has been happening since the beginning of time and before, but since the nature of design has evolved the form of artistic expressions has also evolved, from murals, sculptures and paintings it has moved on to more complex interactive technology driven artifacts like scrolling screens outside the nasdaq building, or the heat sensitive paint in restaurant lobbies, the printed graphics in lobbies and mediatheques with interactive walls. the lalapalooza theory where artists of various genres come together and collaborate on new material, revisit past works to improve styles, techniques, borrow and exchange influences, deconstruct and rebuild their style of working and with every such fest we come closer to losing the extra baggage that we carry as designers and restart our creative thinking with fresh perspectives and newer influences.
movement versus travel. all my life i have gone down the same roads over and over again to the same places, and yet this time something is different. this time its more personal. its more intimate.is it the mode of transportation or just in my head? it probably was the bike, a new view of the old roads. 15 day of pure travel seeing things for the first time in new light. the roads seemed better. the people friendlier. the police trying to help you with friendly smiles and brotherly concerns. india seemed healthy, with all the super highways, and the development that you find along them. i was impressed. it wasnt at all what i was told it would be. skeptics did their job on my head when i was leaving. the whole oh the highways are unsafe. the village people are unfriendly, cops scary, bandits abundant, and such. and now innumerable rides later i am of reformed faith. i believe it is the cities that have gone to the dogs, its is us who are hostile and unfriendly, the bandits live amongst us, and the roads are just the conduits laced with all the goodness left in the world. the 4500 kilometers of indian highways,the countless people,teach you survival, the importance of living over existence. the true worthlessness of money when it comes to doing what you really want.
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