Aurangabad : Early days 04

The first project that I designed for the Municipal Council, Sailu was for a Multipurpose Function hall, with some sports facility. I still remember the day of bhoomi-pujan (ground-breaking), where I was invited to speak about the project in front of the assembled guests. I did the presentation well, and spoiled the whole impact by turning to the President and asking him if this was all I was expected to speak. Anyway, the project was completed to the satisfaction of everyone, the Contractor Mr. Balchandani turned out to be a good choice, the President and the Council very much interested in doing a good project than anything else.

President Advocate Kharkar was a freedom fighter and a man of principles, and would not allow any corruption to happen under his guard. This was rare, even in Marathwada, which was a backward region in many respects except corruption, but I did not know it then. I don’t remember even paying for tea in his presence and he rarely would come to Aurangabad those days so the question of my entertaining him did not arise it at all. Not only that, he would keep a strict eye on the happenings at the site, as I later found out.

Sailu Municipal Council was my only major client at the time, but there were others too. The most notable amongst them was the Vasantrao Naik College, whose Principal Dr. Rajaram Rathod, became a good friend over time, and I did many projects for the college. The first project was the design of the hostel, which was a straightforward block without much scope for design, but later I did the Principal’s Bungalow at the campus and also his own private bungalow in N-3, CIDCO.

But more than the projects, it was the friendships I nurtured here that have lasted me a lifetime. Many illustrious people were working as faculty then, including the Principal Rathod, Dr. Ajit Dalwi, Bapurao Jagtap, and many others. I had a lot of free time in the beginning of my practice and I enjoyed conversation with these learned people about anything and everything. I had a slight leftist leaning at the time due to my previous participation in Yuvak Kranti Dal activities in Solapur, and it turned out that the majority of people at Vasantrao Naik college were either leftist themselves or at least sympathisers of the cause.

This association with Vasantrao Naik College also gave me an opportunity to meet notable people, like Hon’ble Sharad Pawar, whom I met at a school run by Late Mr. Omprakash Shinde. Vasantrao Naik college was at the forefront of the Namantar movement, and many teachers had a direct rapport with the great leader. Pawar saheb was also the Chief Guest at the Inauguration of the Vasantrao Naik memorial at the college, which I had designed, and at time he remembered meeting me earlier, which I found quite remarkable for a public figure who meets hundreds of people every day.  

I became a part of the many activities that were taking place at Vasantrao Naik Collge, and when the college decided to take out a weekly paper, I wrote two articles with tongue-in-cheek humor, my first attempt at political satire, and I think if I had continued, I would have become at least a free-lance columnist, but I started getting more and more work after establishment of a proper office with a reasonably decent set-up, and all thought of being journalist was lost under the pressure of work at the office.

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.

Karad Diaries-7

One of the other subjects that I was fond of, apart from mathematics, was Sanskrit. I scored easily in the subject, and was dismayed when I was not given the lead role in the college Sanskrit play ‘Columbus’. I just did not have the personality for the role, but this was something I could not understand at the time. I also had a morbid fear of public speaking, and participated once in a debating competition at my school to overcome this. I remember mugging up the entire speech, and delivering it mechanically, but that was all. It was only after I joined IIA and was invited to make a speech at the IIA National Convention at Nagpur, that I thought I need to do something about it. I wrote the entire speech, punches and all, and read it at the Convention. I still remember the butterflies in my stomach sitting on the stage before delivery of the speech, but I started out in earnest, and I received good response from the audience, which encouraged me to continue.

After this event, I tried every opportunity of speech at every public event, either by submitting papers to conferences or by impromptu interventions in the form of questions from the floor at every event, which sometimes resulted in invitation to the dais for making a small speech. Eventually I became quite adept at it, which gave me some recognition in the IIA circle, made me Chairman of the IIA Centre at Aurangabad and many other positions later.

This was a far cry from the shy and introvert demeanour I had as a school student in Karad. In spite of my participation in many outdoor activities with my friends, I was essentially an indoor person and did not mind staying put at a place and spending time alone, reading something or the other all the time. I remember reading almost all the hindi novels by Premchand one after another borrowed from the Municipal library at Karad. So reading ‘Dostoevsky’ was not a one-off activity, it was part of a pattern. Looking back, I think all this reading also made me a bit more introvert and less a man of action, which I tried to correct in my later life by joining the Communist Party, but that was after I started my professional career at Aurangabad.

In Karad, the only other activity I remember had to do with the religion or at least a practicing branch of it. Datta Bal, a spiritual Guru, had become famous when we were in school, and I used to attend the prayer meetings run by one of his disciples every Thursday evening, with some of my friends. The meetings were held in a closed room, with the light coming only from an oil lamp in the room in front of a large photograph of Datta Bal, the Guru, and the room would be normally filled with the smoke from the incense. We would try to concentrate on the diagram of Omkar painted on the wall, and recite the prayers en masse. I do not recollect getting any better intellectual or spiritual capacity as a result of these meetings and when I went to 11^th standard, with the pressure of study and other matters like clearing the Intermediate drawing examination for architecture admission, I stopped attending the Thursday meetings.

But the religions and their associated philosophies are fascinating topics, and my interest in religion has continued all my life. Recently I came across ‘The Case for God’ by Karen Armstrong, which stipulates that all religions in the world are basically trying to make their adherents better persons by prescribing a set of rituals about how to go about in life. I never considered myself a religious person as I do not carry out any of the rituals prescribed in my daily life, but found out that by Armstrong’s definition, I was actually a deeply religious person, though a bit gullible one, as many of my forays in being a good Samaritan have resulted in a good bit of trouble for me and my family - but that is a subject of another blog.  

Karad Diaries-6

My college life thus started with stay at my uncle’s place during the term and back to Karad in vacations. I was thus at Karad for the winter vacation in the second year of the course when the youngest of my brothers, Srinivas, was born. My father was away in Mumbai, and the task fell on me to write a telegram to him to come back as mother became suddenly very ill and it seemed that she would not survive the childbirth. I was 17 at the time, and was more worried about the wording of the telegram than the seriousness of the situation we were in.

I later felt guilty about this kind of frivolous concern taking hold of my mind at the time, but I am told that the human mind works in funnier ways than this. Anyway, father came back as a result of the telegram, mother was admitted to the hospital, and everything turned out to be just fine.

It must have been my feeling of inadequacy that was responsible for this kind of concern rather than the problem with the language, which was a part of my studies in school, and moreover, my journey of the English literature had started at Karad well before the admission to architecture. I was already an avid reader, one of the tenants at my mother’s place in Kolhapur was owner of a bookshop and used to have a number of new books delivered at the residence, which he graciously allowed us to read, on the condition that we read them then and there without spoiling them in any way. It was thus my hobby of reading was nurtured, and has stayed with me ever since.

When we moved to Karad, my next door neighbour was an enterprising and ambitious young man, Anil Kulkarni, who gave me a copy of ‘Crime & Punishment’ by Dostoevsky, told me it was a classic and insisted that I must read it. As my knowledge of the language was limited, I read the entire book with a dictionary at my side. In retrospect, it seems a bit too heavy a book to try out in a new language, but strange though it may seem, I developed a taste for English literature because of this first experiment. Anil eventually went over to USA after his graduation in Pharmacy and was quite successful there, became a US citizen and married a Punjabi girl. I googled him and wrote to him when I first went to USA in 2009, and he invited me to visit him, but somehow or the other I could not make the trip. 

Anil was my mentor in many other ways. He lived with his family next door to us, and all of his family members used to carry out all household tasks all by themselves. We were also from the same middle class section of the society, but we had maids for cleaning the utensils and washing the clothes, and I never thought that you need to do anything about it yourself. Anil taught me many of the skill involved in these tasks, including ironing the clothes and I remember we also did a lot of experiments including taking out a blue-print and measuring time by using the solar shadow angle and so on.

He was admitted to the first batch of the pharmacy college that opened at Karad, and I remember attending a cultural event at his college in winter, in which Anil was one of the actors in the play “Shantata Court Chalu Ahe”, a serious drama, the depth of which I could not really understand at the time, but remember a very sad incident on the way back from the event, where I saw a bunch of college students burning a blanket in the bon-fire depriving its owner, a poor man, of his protection in the winter. This happened at least 50 years ago but it is etched on mind as some kind of proof of human carelessness and pointless cruelty.

Karad Diaries-5

Even though my number on the merit list of Sir J. J. College of Architecture was 4, and there were 80 seats, I could not get admission due to a certain rule of Mumbai University regarding groups of subjects, and I was not eligible as the seventh subject I had opted for was Arithmetic and not any of the languages. My father fought about this rule in the University which relented after a month and I was admitted, along-with one other student, Sharad Mahajan from Pune, who was actually number 1 on the merit list but had the same problem. Both of us joined the college in July.

I still remember the day I finally went with my father to Mumbai to stay at my uncle’s place. When we reached CST (VT at the Time) station in Mumbai in late evening, it was raining heavily and no taxi driver was willing to take us. Ultimately father told me take out the raincoat, and we both walked in the rain with our luggage to the uncle’s place, from CST to Yellow Gate Police Station at Indira Docks (Alexandra Docks at the time). Mumbai was much less crowded those days and rain actually cleaned the road, where the storm water drains worked, and the journey via P. D’mello road was something I would remember all the time.

My uncle was a police sub-inspector at the time and had quarters above the Yellow-gate Police Station. It was the only residential premises in the area, all the other buildings were  warehouses, and would have some activity only during the day. I don’t remember any shop or any other kind of building in the area, besides our own building. The ground floor of housed the police station, and the two upper floors had quarters for the sub-inspectors. A service building in the same premises had servant’s quarters, built along with the Police Station in the British era. Both the buildings were in stone with typical british detailing. Once, after coming back from the movie ‘Dracula’, I noticed that the doors opening on the terrace were similar to the doors in the Dracula’s palace, and couldn’t sleep as the frightening scenes from the movie were still fresh in my mind.

The first day of college turned out to be quite disappointing, considering all the effort that we had put in to get admitted. I was told to join a studio in which everyone was drawing parallel lines on a large white sheet of paper, and having drawn first the horizontal lines, we were asked to draw vertical cross lines to form neat square pattern. Though I had all the requisite materials, bought the day before, I remember thinking that it was a frivolous and unworthy task and kept thinking that I have made a mistake in joining architecture. Added to this, the first person I met was Wong Tat, who could not understand any other language than English and my communication skills did not include English at the time, leaving me to talk by gestures alone, which must have puzzled him no end.

I would have left the course the very day, if I had not discovered later in the day that there were also many Maharashtrian students in our class. In fact we had a Marathi Mandal, which carried out cultural events and took out a Marathi bulletin, which featured articles and poems. I became an eager member of the group and contributed poems on a regular basis, so much so that my nickname was ‘Kavi” the poet, though I think it was more in jest, as I now realise I was no great poet, though I fancied myself one, and bore the title proudly.

Karad Diaries-4

One thing that I shall always cherish about the schooldays in Karad was the exalted status they gave me as one of the brightest students, particularly in the subject of mathematics. We had a new teacher in the 10^th class, Mr. M. N. Joshi, who was one of the SSC Board toppers and he decided to test our acumen on the very first day of joining. That year the SSC Board had changed the pattern of the examination, where questions were not directly based on the text-book, and unless you had a certain problem solving ability it was difficult to even translate the question properly in the mathematical framework. Mr. Joshi used this paper to test us, and I scored the highest in the class, 41 out of 75.  As this was a question paper for the 11^th class while we were in 10^th, even this score was remarkable. I was famous for scoring 100 out of 100 in Mathematics my earlier school at Kolhapur, but in Karad I was a nobody till this incident.

I was already in the A Division meant for the brighter students, and this incident made me a contender for a place in the list of honours at state level, alongwith Dinesh Deshpande, Pradeep Kashalkar and later Chandrashekhar Sabnis, who joined us in 11^th standard. After some time Mr. M. N. Joshi left the school to found his own coaching classes and we were students of his first batch, classes for which were held in a makeshift place previously used as a gymnasium. Mathematics ruled the day here, and once, when I declared my inability to attend an extra class due to my prior commitment to a drawing class, everyone laughed and derided me for putting drawing before mathematics. I had to explain that I needed to clear the Intermediate Level in the State Drawing Examination as I intended to join architecture after my matriculation. Unlike the current aspirants to the course of architecture, I had absolutely no idea what architecture was all about, only that I needed to clear the Drawing Examination for eligibility of admission to the course.

None of us could, however, make it to the state level honours list, to the disappointment of all, though I managed to get 99 out of 100 in Higher Mathematics and 91 out 100 in Arithmetic. Dinesh Deshpande joined UDCT, Pradeep Kashalkar joined Arts in the hope of making it to IAS, but could not make it and had to contend with a good position in a Bank. Chandrashekhar Sabnis became a doctor, but later died young due to a tragic accident. I met Pradeep later when he was transferred to Aurangabad, but have no contact with Dinesh after school and have no idea of what happened to him.

But my closest friend at Karad was Shrikant Sane, who did not figure in all this competition. Shrikant used to stay near my place, and we would be together for almost all the time. Shrikant taught me swimming; he was an expert, and with him and other friends I used to roam around doing trekking & many other exploits together. Once we had a shot at sighting the ghosts on the riverbank where there was a cremation ground and were told that the ghosts generally loiter there on a no-moon night. We used to study in the night at Shrikant’s place and decided to check this out, but when we ventured out on the next no-moon night at about 11.00 pm, our courage failed us after reaching the bank of the river and we ran back reciting Ramaraksha all the way. Of course, the other exploits worked, like trekking in the mountains of Agashiva and Sadashiva. Agashiva was a difficult trek, crossing over a few ranges, but Sadashiva was easier and I remember running all the way down the mountain just for the heck of it. Those indeed were happy days.

Karad Diaries-3

The earthquake occurred in the early morning, waking all of us up instantly. We were all sleeping on the floor as usual, but earth under us moved to and fro as if we were all sleeping on a giant swing, and we could not understand what was happening at first. We were all frightened, Sanju suggested we recite Ramaraksha and we all started reciting it in earnest. This went on for what felt like eternity, but could not have been more than a few minutes. After the movement stopped and everything was quite still, we rushed out of the house and assembled in the front courtyard. All the members of the landlord’s family had already gathered here, who, like us, were in their night-dresses, and there, in the sight of other people, we recovered enough to talk animatedly about the experience.

As it turned out, this was not altogether a novel experience for some from the landlord’s family, who used to live at Koyananagar, where earthquakes had occurred previously, but of course, they were of a smaller magnitude. We later learnt the devastating effects of this quake, which had caused havoc in Koyananagar and surrounding area near the epicentre of the earthquake. Our school was converted into a makeshift hospital to cater to the large number of people who were caught in the collapsing buildings and suffered injuries. After this quake, there were many aftershocks, and I remember sleeping out on the street en masse, for fear that the house would collapse over our head and later we moved to Kolhapur for a few months as the school was closed and we were given temporary admission in Vidyapeeth High School near Ambabai Temple in Kolhapur.

Surprisingly, there was virtually no damage to the structure of the house we lived in, mainly because it was a single storied structure with brick walls and a lightweight roof of steel sheets. So after a few months, we came back and continued to live in the same house as if nothing was amiss. I continued with my studies, and it was about an year after that I tried to take my life for reasons I can not remember, nor justify in any way.

As I recollect, we had a few choice locations for study, which I had found out with my friends in the school. One was under the old bridge over Koyana, where there was a gap between the steel girders and top of the stone pier of the bridge. This was quite high up and tricky to reach from the road at top but not really scary as the pier was very wide and the height of girder was about 6’, giving a good headroom. The other location was inside the shikhar (roof) of a deserted temple on the bank of the river, which was slightly dark inside but gave enough light from the opening to enable us to read if we sat just near the opening. It was in this location I tried drinking Tic-20, an insecticide, but apart from its horrible taste it turned out to be quite harmless. I have forgotten where I procured the bottle or why I did it, but remember that I felt relieved after I found out it did not work.

Much later, in an IIA seminar on character building, we were discussing the fears and loss of self-confidence in the young who are unable to accept the reality about them; I disagreed with the speaker and said nobody can feel insecure about his physical features or appearance, which is genetically programmed, but later recalled this incident and felt there might be some truth in this after all, as I recall no other reason for me to be so unhappy as to try to take my own life at the time.