Pensive

Every process can be disintegrated into small processes. And in a teamwork people have to play there strength, and do their part of it.
When you are capable of performing the process all by yourself, you do not need the team to work with. But the team can reduce your workload leaving you to do things you are good at. It also gives you freedom for doing things that you must do for your own satisfaction.
This is like hiring an expert on a specific aspect of the process. But people usually want to reduce their work load in order to avoid thinking. It's an escape to not to work, and to exist by depending on others.
Such teams survive on one backbone of a true creator. The rest is generally a bunch of parasites, good for almost nothing. The things that they claim to have done, are things anyone could have done. And mostly these are the things that stand as blocks in the path of the creator, who is feeding them all. By being part of his team they get the right to interfere in his work undeservingly.
This is the crux of the thing I must be fighting hopelessly against. Till date I could not find the correct shape and size of the enemy. But now I know that the shape is ugly and the size, mighty vast!
And yes! It is "not" the teamwork, but the hidden bug inside it!

For a trial I have been working on a group project which we finished today itself.
Being a student you have to do group assignments. And I can do most of them as long as designing is not directly concerned. The research works, case studies are best done in groups.
But my root question is, Can an idea or a concept be shared by two minds? Yes, Ideas can be communicated, tested and improved by two individuals but they cannot be created by two minds.
May be the team helps you to "improve" your design but can a team "create" a design?
Please tell me if anyone knows the answer...

• When I draft I feel as if fighting with the blank white spread of the paper, fighting manually, to finally win over the blankness by the thought that rules the paper, gives meaning to it. As if the effort I put in gives some vector force to the paper caught in stativity by the grey lines on the paper.
This feeling can never be matched by CAD workings. Yes, it will again be a tool to save effort and be efficient, but drafting manually is like worshipping the God. There is no shortcut to it. You want to do it yourself, manually, taking time, physical and mental effort....to feel the God.....
How could this be done in a group? How can you share the feel of ecstasy with people? Can a cult, a herd of men achieve bliss?
• There has been a great fight in my mind about the concept of designing in groups, about architects who work as associates. I cannot see it possible. But these associate firms seem to exist and function or rather flourish! Every where everyone is inviting group entries for design competitions, for new projects coming up in the city, for every new venture.
When I go to give my name as an individual participant they look at me and ask how are you going to do it alone? If I cannot do it alone, I would rather quit the field than depending on someone else's creativity.
• Fighting nothingness by creating something nearing to the perfection in its wake is the most benevolent act we can do to the world.
• Could intimacy be part of all aspects of life? Could we feel the same, while producing a new building on the sheets in front of us? Is it possible for us to work for that pleasure of existence and not because we have to work?
• Sometimes it sounds very luxurious to think like that. Are we in position to work for our pleasure? What about the responsibilities that life bestows on us? What do we choose in situation where the two clash badly?

Lots of birthday wishes to my dear friend Amruta. I know her since I started thinking, or we can say I started to look around the world with open eyes.
Since then she has been patiently listening to the mad theories I keep digging into! She is one rare pleasurable soul that could support, contradict or improve on my crude theories. We both learnt a lot together. And now we are learning things separately, but inside we know that even if the paths differ, we reach the same home in the end. The brief times when we communicate we love to watch each other reaching the same place but by a different rout.
In any corner of the world and at any time of life I will always wish that you stay safe and happy forever. You deserve it!You will earn it!
Hope to share lots more adventures with you, Amruta. Happy birthday.

These are some of the musings I had while attending a down to root useless lecture in college. Of course it has started with the desperation that these lectures cause! But finally it ended up in a good rulebook for me. Now is time to check them in this space-time that I call reality!
• Solitude and peace of mind are difficult to achieve and easy to lose once achieved.
• Finding ineptitude at a place of authority is the most depressing situation. Handle with care!
• Wrong logic can be fought with the right one but there is no medicine for lack of logic.
• How to save time, space and mind from counter constructive authority sitting firmly on your head?
• Having food for the need of body and not for the pleasure of mind is very difficult. It requires entire change in the core of your mindset. The mind needs to learn better concepts of its food. And it needs to realize that it has no dependence on any kind of physical food. This is one change that cannot be taught to the self. It has to rise inside. And the same logic runs behind every illusion of physical need that we mentally depend on.
• Rules do not discipline people, but responsibilities do. Or... they might discipline people.
• The technical procedures and details create a particular space and give certain feel to it. The two have to go hand in hand. Neither can be achieved without the other. The building immediately has a personality- or let us say identity- as soon as it is technically created whether in mind or in material, both equally real and, good or evil.
• Things that essentially have to be learnt cannot be taught!
• The industrial revolution brought an age of mechanization with its fast pace. Those who kept fighting against it may be wanted the Stone Age man to live in the future.
• Any mechanism, technology or tool designed by a human is meant to save human effort wasted on a work, to be used for better and more humanly purpose.
• Those who do not identify the better in themselves want to be paid for the same subhuman effort that they keep producing.
• Home is not where you physically live. It is the place you are born to live at. The home that you dream has to be earned. The price is not money but your growth towards you as you should be.

Money is truly very funny thing. More we run after it, more it runs away. But no guaranty that it will return to you if you stop persuading it! Those who want money keep losing it and those who want to get rid of it, end up with more of it! Some people work day and night and are yet unsatisfied with the money they have and some earn the fortune without much of effort. Some make money out of nothing and some make nothing out of money. For some money is the aim and for some it is a mean to reach their aim.
But money can be none of these. It could be a reward earned righteously in exchange of a product born out of your own intellectual or physical work. Not as alms or subsidy but as price of your existence, as your worth. Who will decide the worth? None but the work itself will decide its price. Every penny of it that you earn and spend must be the price of satisfaction you get in return of the transaction. This could be the only way money can be converted into happiness. The thought or dream or just the fact of owning it can not make you happy. So money can buy happiness only if there is happiness in the market to be bought! And by the time you earn money to buy the happiness, you realize the happiness was already with you, all the time!
So finally what's the use of everything?

Before the monsoon, here we have custom of cutting trees randomly. The reason is said that the trees obstruct the overhead electric wires and crash on our cars in storms.
So the trees have to be cut... entirely.... And only the stubs are left standing like disfigured handicapped figures on the ground. There is an empty hole left on the skyline. Through the hole, you can see more of concrete and more and more of it.
...The nature is still forgiving and creating life out of destruction. The stubs disagree with their disfigured form and sprout new feelers of soft green leaves. Start afresh to absorb the evil breathed out by us and fill the air with fresh smelling life, in return. By the next monsoon coming, the trees flourish in their full blossoms, shooting out of the ground in all directions, the joy of existence... the joy of being able to create life......And at the bottom of their festive foliage is the stub reminding us our defeat....at destroying them... at destroying ourselves ultimately.

I met a fakeer at the bakery shop round the corner of my house today. He was just as all of them are, imposingly begging money out of your pocket...saying things like the almighty may award you lots of money and progress, to the little shopkeeper boy. The poor boy gave him a couple of rupees. Then this baba turned to me and said a weird thing.... He said that if I honestly try to achieve something, destiny will always back me up.
I don't know what all beggars do to touch your chords and make you put your hand in your pocket, but this was something I heard for the first time. It was about trying honestly to get something.....not the usual crap about having good many children and socially acceptable husbands! And that's exact what made me look up to his face.....How can an old fakeer on the road have such a cool and piercing pair of eyes that instead of seeking pity, back your well-hidden innocence up?
I never before bothered to look carefully at the fakeers and babas plenty in Indian public spaces. Well! Who does? But this old man seemed to help me rather than begging for it!
He could be a professional mind reader and might know how to take money out of people of my age. But he won at that point of time....as I emptied all the change that the bakery-boy gave me in his sharp long fingered palm.
Then I could not look at him again. I thought he must be laughing at me.....
Now that I can think rationally I tried to recall how much money I could possibly have put on his hand. By the look on the face of that bakery-boy, it must have been quiet an amount....
ummm.....I could be that foolish at times? Was that exactly foolish of me? Or the thing he said really deserved the response I gave?
I think what he said was exactly what I needed. So the money I might have wasted was the fees for that! Its okay I guess....

whenever I try to think SERIUOSLY about life, it gets even more funnier!

While musing on the same thought of thought behind everything,I face this reality!
If everything is born out of some thought, a projection of someone's fertile creative mind. Then we all must have been born out of some thought again. Who conceived the ultimate thought of anything existing at all? Who could be thaaat great a thinker?