Lucknow Residency-post 1857

Roaring cannonballs,
Firing guns,
Dashing adventurers,
The Mother's brave sons.

They all fought,
On this land,
For this land,
One to keep it,
and the other,
To command.

Eroded walls,
Collapsed beams,
Meandering cracks,
A building falling apart,
At its seams.

Staircase ghosts,
Missing bricks,
Disappearing fast,
Legend meets the present,
In these relics of the past.

The memories,
Are here to stay,
As long as
These relics last.

You can still hear
The canons roar,
Behold!
As the bricks bleed
The gaping wounds sore.

Judgement day.......

Most students of architecture would identify with me when I say that it is something about the final submission that makes the whole semester seem like a mundane exercise and that makes us associate jury day with Kingdom come....

True thy will IS done at the end of the day. The strong prevail, the weak crumble and the jury, aka St. Peter pronounces the judgement for you. In this mortal land of course the holy words are spoken through an obscure list that everybody is clawing at on the first floor notice board. The class representative or the chosen one has the privilage to collect it from the cradle of the Lord himself (translated as college office) and thereby impart it to the rest of His flock.The whole charade, if you ask me, has the imagery of Moses emerging with his ten commandments. Then again I may be going crazy for it is "judgement day" for me next week and news is the jury is the "taskmaster" Himself.

Jama Masjid at daybreak...breathtaking!! 

Shadows.....

The city's largest "golchakkar"

Today I took a stroll down Janpath, the Cardus of the Indian capital. Lutyens may have done much damage to the place or may have created a masterpiece...whatever the stand, the fact remains, these roads nearly 75 years later still function better than most of those built by "apna DDA." True he was merely painting a very autocratic picture on a very large canvas, true that we continue to cling on to that canvas as our pride and joy and also true that we have happily accepted this British "acropolis" as a willing hand-me-down without much inclination to alter it let alone replace it. The question remains, "could we have done any better?" The answer lies in the 15 minuite traffic clogs that jam the cities life lines. One could however argue that while at the end of the day, lacs of weary Delhites who make their way through these bottled up routes, only one man with his smart entourage, returns home to "Rashtrapati Bhavan".