Architecture & Soul
Indian City Planning & human needs.

A brief note on Indian city planning and human needs

How human has become a tool and overall society is developing without considering us as living organism?

What is happening to this world? What is happening to our environments? What are we creating out there and where the hell have we left our souls? My soul cries watching the cities, when the sun is rising in the early morning hours. I see children playing between mountains of garbage, I see an old man in dirty clothes, counting his last coins for a chai on the road side, I see people running up and down concrete roads, wanting to move their bodies freely, craving for a glimpse of light and fresh air. Craving for nature. But all they get is a foggy, blurry image of a once beautiful shining dream of wealth, comfort and happiness that now follows its own laws.

In this dream, it seems that India's city development has exploded beyond its scope and has been overtaken by mainly profit-oriented market forces, irrespective long term quality and durability. The shape the cities are taking nowadays is a frightening scattered and sprawling mechanism, which grows too fast to even grasp it. Irrespective of natural habitats it consumes huge areas of land, pure and precious not only to ourselves, but to the whole world. We as human beings seem to have lost our connection to this purity and decided to prefer closed, safeguarded societies in something that we call security. But what is social security? Does it really need to be made up of grey concrete walls that disconnect us from our natural environment and from our natural social being? We have forgotten our responsibility for each other. Social awareness and responsibility if understood rightly, binds us humans together and can overcome the need for external security. Irrespective of that, built realities all over India have become unstructured low dense projects with insufficient social infrastructure that are coming up everywhere independent from each other.

Climate Change : slow down & our existance in nature

My heart dances; my body floats and my eyes wet the face with the first dew when I read these touching lines of Rabindranath Tagore. All of my chakras come alive when I close my eyes and shut my ears to the chaos and noise at the traffic light of ITO. My winged senses take me into a world of peace and love where every peck of dust is thankful to the universe for being a participant of this interconnected and inter woven world.

The world is disturbed yet my heart is struggling for what it desires than to lose itself in what it does not desire. Love for nature does not come from the fears of the human extinction. Motivation to protect the planet comes from 'the realization' that we are a part of everything that is around. Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, his own survival will come to an end. We are estranged from reality and inclined to treat everything valueless that we have not made ourselves. Lost in the glare of technological advancement we detach ourselves from a much important bond. We forget that nature is not income but our capital in which we need to invest. Measuring advancement only in terms of GDP makes us disqualify the simple life of a tribal in the jungle of Arunachal whom we then provoke to become like us. We often forget that simplicity is a rational response if we think we live in a living universe, as we want to reduce needless clutter and complications and engage with the infusing aliveness of authentic relationships, meaningful work, caring communities and creative expressions.