Wednesday, December 25, 2019
IT LOOKED LIKE A GRAVEYARD
It looked like a government school
Or a graveyard,
I couldn't make up my mind which,
Sometimes,
They seemed like the same to me
Both had bodies,
In one they were still alive!
I was moved,
To memories of devastating earthquakes
Where children
Were trained, carefully, to take
shelter under their desks,
and so Died
A horrible death, for an education
Of little meaning!
Even
The simplest task
To save their lives was taught wrong!
All the song
And dance around alphabets and numbers come to naught.
This sudden thought,
came flooding back!
I can hear
In my head the dull tune
of their Learing by rote,
(It sticks in my throat)
The repeating of meaningless words
To quote,
As if the repeating would suddenly change
The fate of from where it is they came!
Another quake is all it will take
To take their future in its wake.
To me,
It looks like graveyard, they call it school
I suppose they know, they make the rule
24 December 2019
*this piece was born as i recalled the haunting description of the many deaths of school children in the last earthquake of Afghanistan, a few years ago, while i was on a plane to Delhi on the 20th night, in the air, with a twitter feed that informed me of another earthquake of 6.3 in the region which also carried a mention of Delhi. I was mid air when i scrolled through my phone and saw this update. It was a eerie feeling, and the in ability to get information broke me into a sweat.
It was written while travelling to Lucknow, on the 24th.
A few months ago, while in Uttarakhand, i had walked into a lonely, and desolate government school campus and wondered what the children might be learning here, and what was the education they were getting preparing them for.
This poem is fictitious, but asks both those questions.
On a more serious note i am appalled that the signboard outside of this school opposite the Saket metro station, it is quite clear why i hope.
Labels: Afghanistan, children, death, design, earthquake, education, graveyard, hills, poem, questions architecture, school, seismic, Uttarakhand
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Of Bread and Columns
A building, carefully designed and well done, is always a pleasure to walk into. Many-a-time the sheer complexity of project realities see a well-intentioned idea rubbished as it is built in haste and hurry.
Making good architecture is like baking bread. The most simple of ingredients – flour, yeast, salt, water - there are no one million recipes to chose from, and yet there is bread and there is bread. The making, the ferment, the kneading, and the sheer utter patience of waiting for the honest dough to rise oftentimes make the difference between one loaf and the next. Between bread, and bread.
Making good architecture is like baking bread. The most simple of ingredients – flour, yeast, salt, water - there are no one million recipes to chose from, and yet there is bread and there is bread. The making, the ferment, the kneading, and the sheer utter patience of waiting for the honest dough to rise oftentimes make the difference between one loaf and the next. Between bread, and bread.
If you have eaten bread baked at home, made from yeast watched over till it rose to the perfect height and then kneaded with love and effort into the perfect ball of dough, and then baked for an hour and half, to then turned out and glazed with butter and egg-white, you will know what I mean.
So too, I think, it is with buildings, what goes in is usually the same, but the skill and the patience of the kneading hand has, always, a telling consequence on the aftermath.
That is what I encounter every time I walk into one of J A Stein’s buildings. Their simplicity, and directness of address never fail to amaze me.
But what makes me write this post are the columns at the gymnasium of the American Embassy School. Simple, stark, purpose-shaped concrete, beautiful and solid, yet elegant. Standing robust and proud, to the eye that cared to notice, and not doing more.
A simple column, in a gymnasium can be an architectural delight, a sheer pleasure to behold. I, for one, stood there, amazed for a good few minutes. This, a hall of very beautiful columns in concrete, a rare pleasure. The brilliance is hard to miss. The sheer clarity of purpose, in shape, in form, in feel, in colour, in scale, all suddenly unfolds, like layer upon layer of carefully crafted toffee in the mouth.
There is very little that separates good architecture from bad buildings, and yet there is so much. Simplicity most often, and that is the hardest thing to do. In an age of visual gymnastics, even harder.
There is always some thing to take back from a walk in any of Stein’s works. Something always makes space in the memory. Like now, a fair–faced concrete column, they don’t make them like that anymore.
Or, do they? But you will have to look. Or wait for the smell to waft through the air, and pull you there, like good bread.
Labels: architecture, building, cast, column, concrete, concrete column, design, fair-faced, purpose, school, Stein
