ironies and more

this is for all the crazy things that happened over the past few days, like for example when right across from our decidedly and vociferously left wing school, our decidedly and vociferously right wing management called mr advani’ji’ as chief guest for an anniversary special. paul went. i had a meeting in dadar which leads me the fact that we drove there to meet the assistant commissioner of police for traffic for a plan to remove vehicular traffic from certain roads and relocate parking- and i had to keep driving around because there was anyways a lack of it in the area. knowing the a.c.p. did not help in any way even on the way back as it took 2 hours to get back.

earlier in the day someone from the university of melbourne spoke about two museums in australia where identity was being manufactured through the manipulation of space. museums become theme parks and entertainment and leisure replace knowledge and research. collage and references in one museum were compared to the white monumentality of a war museum.

the previous evening at a party at manojs’ i met subu after ages; i haven’t met her since the marriage. she is looking good and happy.

and still resonating in my head right now are the variety of heated discussions all around about research and practice. from the dialectical to the ‘stalinesque’ (as kausik calls dogmatism) to the question of pre-determined analytical structures that are superimposed on objects and are forcibly made to fit (does the object still have any meaning left after this reduction?), to questions of space (finding the right one or making it yourself);to what makes good teachers, good projects, good thesis students, good architecture, what generates architectural language?, what is architectural language? will therapy help him? will he continue? what happens now?– who should we allocate to whom to for the next years thesis? - these are the words in my head. these, and more.