India is the land of storytelling. Since time
immemorial oral narratives have been the
medium of India’s learning and self-awareness.
Oral traditions are kept alive by temple artisans
and priests, by wandering minstrels, and
dramas in village fairs and tamashas. Stories
can be conveyed through songs, dances, paintings,
and of course dramas. Indian stories often
share spiritual meanings, but like the
Harikatha stories of Andhra Pradesh, they also
educate people about ‘self-atma’ through
stories showing us paths of liberation. The
British and the Nizam banned Burra Katha
stories of South India, because they used
satire and new ideas to raise questions about
justice and rational governance. The post-
Independence age needed stories of hope and
romance, as well as apprehension. The nation
needed a vision and a new identity. Pandit Nehru
was a great storyteller, uplifting everyone
through his stories of hope, and a path into the
future, while our present Prime Minister gifts
the nation narratives of a better life to come!
The human settlements we have lived in, and
the buildings we have lived in, have molded and
tempered the way we think about space, form
and urban structure. In a way, these buildings
and spaces are stories too. Experiences in urban
and built space generate deductive rationality
about the way the world is, and gift formative
logic about the way the world should be!
These are neither static experiences nor
single-shot photo images of a context imbedded
in our thoughts. Rather, these experiences are
narratives that have beginnings and endings,
openings and closures, even conclusions and
lessons. So, there are stories that lie in our
subconscious being, stories drawn from the
choreographies of our lives, from the places
where we have lived, all telling us who we are,
what the world is like and giving us hints of
the logic of why things are this way, or that.
Most of our paintings, dramas, and even our
buildings, betray autobiographical stories
about their authors that molded their
existence and determined their designs. Through
these creations we are searching for the
reality of ourselves! Within these stories
crafted in built form, and histories laid out in
our city plans, we are leaving eternal
footprints of our being on this earth.
Architects are very different from other
professionals: lawyers fight cases over
misdeeds of the past and each case is a story
with protagonists; accountants and auditors
try to put last year’s figures in an appropriate
order, becoming dry prose with only victims;
doctors try to save us from our past
recklessness, or bad fate, and these become
high dramas. But these are stories of the past.
Architects and urban planners are always
working in the realm of the future, doing
something creative today that will not happen
tomorrow, or even next year, or even many
years later. Dealing with the future is more
uncertain than dealing with the present or past.Our stories are therefore more complex, messy
and even chaotic. They are a journey through
the unknown toward an untold destination. So,
before I begin to tell you my stories, let me confess
that architects write their stories backwards!
That is, they begin with the end in mind! Maybe
in telling you my stories, I am telling you
narratives of my future, and yours too?
To give you an idea of what I am pondering, let
me tell you the first story, that I’ll call Adventure.Story One: The Story of Adventure
Bringing things into order, finding patterns
generic to things, and making templates into
which things can be ‘ordered’ are the unique
feats of the human brain, driving our
strongest emotional compulsions. Yet, this
ordering project leads one to something I call
the human conclusion, wherein almost all
human societies come back to a common set of
concerns in an interesting closure of the human
condition. To make this short, can I say we all
get trapped into the same rites of passage,
and the same predictable samskara? In other
words: life is a trap.
Perhaps, because of my identity as an
‘outsider’, my life has been a story of escapes
seeking alternative meaning systems, and
freedom from oppression. Or, perhaps I found
middle-class American stereotypes just too
mundane and boring to commit myself to.
So, I began a search, even as a child, doing
poorly in studies, yet finding myself immersed