self pity / all the things that occupy my mind

i guess the end of semester is always like this. mandess. i am trying to come to temrs with the fact that you are going to be the bad guy for so many students who might fail, meeting parents who are desperately trying to pay the next years fees for their kids, or kids whose year has been colossal down in the ups and downs of growing up- and now it seems too late to catch up, or those who fell ill and lost months of work, or so many more. meanwhile there is the studio faculty who claim some universal ‘standrd’ by which students are to be judged, laying down the law and making someone else actually do the dirty work. in this case – yours truly. so there we are juggling these emotional balls and trying to keep sane when there si the rets of the world- the exchange programmes, the design cell projects, the council inspections (next week- by the way) and the guest lectures (today’s was cancelled and that’s why i am home early) and somewhere in the middle there we teach too.
last week ended the bidders presentations for the dharavi project. we are part of the experts committee to oversee the proposals by developers. and this time the rhetoric has changed- everyone talks about community, livelihood, light and ventilation. the densities are still mind boggling and the solutions desperately try and make sense of them to make reasonable built form. unfortunately only few good intentions manage to make it to the end.
to chill on saturday after a grueling drive to pune and back where i discovered the naked men and commie sign on the ceiling fo the cdsa building we went for a party to bandra that was seedy and musty with the smell fo the cologne of lonely people looking for love- or at least some sex. walked out feeling ill.
on monday sonal, mom and me went to worli for an indian classical music concert. the sitar was efficient but boring and rajan sajan mishra were way off form as the main singer had lost his voice.
also the jigsaw puzzle was completed in the past two days and lies at my feet waiting to be framed and the stepney of the car needs to be fixed. ustaads is the new joint in ic colony where we eat- cheap, durable and good kababs.
confounded by the collisions of thousands of different forces upon every single munite of the day, i feel like a mess. is someone here volunteering a massage?