Aurangabad : Early days 03

After doing the agreement for architectural services with the Sailu Municipal Council, I decided to resign from the job, which was anyway a contract appointment and would not have continued for long. I remember getting Rs. 95.00 for the last six days of my work, and the argument about the experience certificate, which the clerk refused to issue for the entire duration as I was not allowed to have any leave but took one anyway and there was a break in service. Finally we settled on a certificate which stated two separate periods, before and after the break, but I have lost the certificate now obtained after so much trouble.

We had now moved to another place in Osmanpura, which was an outhouse of a bungalow, and had already two residents, Avinash Gore and Prakash Patwardhan. Avinash was a steno-typist in LIC, and Prakash was his cousin, working in the ST Workshop at Chikhalthana. The two cousins could not have been any different. Avinash was short and a bit overweight, a bit diffident and looked every inch a white-collar worker he was, while Prakash was 6’ tall, about 4’ wide and had a rough voice and manners. It was Prakash who would get us tickets to all the movies, by pushing forward with exact cash in hand at the crowded ticket window. This was before the advent of television, and the ticket windows at the Cinema halls were always a battleground, which made it a perfect place for Prakash.

Avinash was an LIC employee and a better wage earner than all of us, and being of a generous nature, did not mind sponsoring a lot of activities of the group. But we were all actually in the category of struggling youths. When I decided to leave my job to start full time architectural practice, we were not sure whether it would work, so Jayanta decided to retain his job at the Town Planning Department and support me in his spare time, so what started as a partnership idea eventually landed me in an individual practice without any security of future.

When I look back to those days now, it looks like the worst way to start any new venture. Not only we were living in an out-house with two totally unconnected partners, there was virtually no set-up there for an office. We would draft the drawings ourselves sitting on the floor, and the typing work was done initially by Avinash, as he was a professional. But there was no way we could call it an office space, and we did not have any money then to start with a decent set-up. It was a wonder we could retain clients, with the kind of set-up we had, or maybe, nobody had any idea as to what should be the proper set-up for an architect’s office. After some time we again moved back to Rokadiya Hanuman Colony, which was a better accommodation, but still a shared residential space. It was here that I first met Ashok Desai, the structural consultant, who was a next door neighbour, and became a very close friend later on.

Jayanta got transferred to Nanded and I was left alone to carry out all the tasks involved in practice. Fortunately my two year stint at V. T. Kota and Associates at Solapur had prepared me for this and eventually I was able to open my own independent office at Nageshwarwadi after two years of landing in Aurangabad.