Renaissance Idiot's ramblings

This essay was drafted as a response to the question "What was your initial idea about design?" during the introductory sessions in NID Ahmedabad . Dated July 2025. Design as an architecture student was to design buildings at the end of the day. A well-designed building was climatically efficient while being geometrically and visually pleasing. We were taught design as something scientific, where material constraints and space use needed to be understood. Every drawing was meant to address all human activity and needs, while balancing client requirements and aspirations. Design became a formula to achieving the fundamentals to a good building. Although we were taught how design borrows from art, it was never a comparison between the two; architecture was different and superior. As I worked in Charles Correa Foundation (An organisation dedicated to keeping the ideas of the imminent post-independence Indian architect relevant) I was opened to the social role of architecture an...

Render by Author. Change always hits you from around the corner. It’s all smooth sailing to the goal till everything turns upside down. And then you have to have to stop pick up the pieces that remain and keep walking. Or sometimes change the goal because the said goal is impossible to reach now. It is demotivating and people will usually fall in a slumber or a pit of self-pity. For me it was my own self-hatred returning, It takes a long time to look myself in the mirror and blame myself for the situations that have come forward.  I know the person on the other side feels the same if not worse. Nevertheless, somewhere my heart does not want to acknowledge that. My heart takes for granted that it’s always more valid that it is the one that aches and nothing else. Is it romanticism then? That will make me be content with being miserable. Or is it the fact that somewhere, I have grown to think that to succeed in something, it really takes someone to be awful; either in his circumsta...

What part of myself makes me wake up every day, attend to my hygiene, eat breakfast and head out to catch my bus to work? Over 99.9% of the world shares this trait with me; who want to survive and provide for the people they care about and continue doing the same every day. This is including a minority of sociopaths who can go out of their way to hurt others indirectly in order to further themselves. A notable mention of this phenomenon for myself was in May 2020, when the country locked down and mass hysteria filled the news and streets. I was lucky to live with three other people with whom I shared this conundrum. Every day was somehow a positive start for us who came together to do basic tasks like figuring out where to get groceries from and praying for when will the alcohol shops open again. The Haywain by Hieronymous Bosch c. 1490-9 Bosch, inspired from religious teaching, would paint scenes of people rejoicing in heaven, living on earth and suffering in hell. These were meant to...