This article is an impassioned plea by Sabu Francis to remove the gentle hypocrisy that exists in our profession...

A hush in the audience. The speaker is talking gently, clearly. There is a general empathy to what is being spoken. A tingling goes up the spine of the younger architects in the audience. Even the older ones are enthralled. The description that is reverberating in the auditorium is about the intricate delicate-ness and the subtelities of a work of architecture that is way beyond the crass commercial. The lights are dim but the slides are sharp and the points made are even sharper. The lecture ends. Everybody comes out of the auditorium, quite clear about what is good architecture and what is not.

The polarisation of the intellect has been neatly accomplished among the beginners; the first years in architecture. For the others, it has been reinforced.

We all seem to know what we mean by 'deep' architecture. That is the one where every aspect of architecture is thought about - or it looks as such. That may be the one where the client finally listened. That may be the one where the architect contributed. The one, where the contractor got really -I mean really- involved. But it is never, repeat never, any run of the mill, ordinary work. Nobody discusses the ordinary.

I used to think I knew that is what I wanted to aspire to, when I was younger. It fitted into with what was (and is) conventionally agreed upon. People nowadays feel that I want to be a non-conformist, because being a non-conformist was in my blood. That is not so. Non-conformism was thrust upon me. I used to subscribe to the definitions of the good architecture and the bad one, till I met the John Doe architect. (Curiously, the term 'John Doe' is an American one: They have an euphemism for the 'common' man. Just so that one can talk about the common man separately from the Clintons and the whoever. Our culture in India used to be gracious enough to accomodate a lot of shades of grey. Unfortunately, we too we have started out this differentiation)

So, I did meet the John Doe architect.

I see ordinariness everywhere. I see works that do not announce their subtelities from the roof tops. In fact, they went about exposing all their stupidities to everybody and cleaned dirty laundry out in the front. We all know them. They are works of the John Does, whether we liked it or not. Or whether they liked it or not. Once you realise the enormity of the architectural scene in India, you must realise that that there is plenty of 'ordinariness' among us all. But when we talk about architecture, none of us want to be them. But they are there allright. Who owns the authorship to these works of architecture? The author is hiding in the audience (and sometimes on the podium too)

So, the person who is milling about in the foyer of the auditorium, deeply involved in the review of the lecture that had just finished; could be one. The other one who is known for possessing erudite knowledge in such matters could also be one. What about that dignified, grey haired person around whom the sophamore seem to gather? That architect could also be our John Doe.

But no one would admit of being one. I would like to explore the theme of this gentle hypocrisy that is invading into the noble profession of architecture in this article. There is much too much empty words and imprecise terms that flies thick in any architectural meet. People have become afraid of being ordinary, and instead pretend that there is a distinct ideal that we all have to aspire to, which is distinctly different from what most of us do.

I am now older, and as I accumulate that repulsive thing known as 'experience', I seem to derive more knowledge from long forgotten children's stories: As seen in the story of the Emperor's new clothes, we seem to be bending down to the despotic intellectual dictators in architecture. It is time we giggled at the emperor's new clothes and made fun of the invisible cloak of 'deep' architecture that the emperor is wearing.

Can we really polarise our intellectual positions about architecture? The common, uncouth architecture is all around us. Can we deny it? It exists! and that in itself is a much more deeper statement that any other coffee-shop argument made about 'deep' architecture. Why do we have this obsession at trying to determine that particular species of architecture that is special. Why cannot the common, also be special?

The invasion of Western ideas has not just eroded into our eating habits. And I am also not merely talking about glass curtain walls that keeps coming up in the 'freezing cold' climate of Mumbai. The whole philosophy of life seem to be changing. My mom used to go shopping with her old cloth bag. She never went out to make an ecological statement. The yin-and-the-yang were perfectly balanced. We treated the special and the non-special equally and fairly. Nowadays, if I carried my own shopping bag, my juniors would look at me with respect- the architect who understood how it was to be sensitive to nature. They whispered among each other and now had a role model to look upto. The simple, common shopper who brings in vegetables in a plastic bag -- because the vendor happened to give it in one -- is suddenly a criminal. We seem to be shaping our intellects based on what the end products were packaged in: If the explanation of the design is ensconced in the right packaging of words it goes well with the audience. But if the moles and warts are exposed, then it is automatically assumed to reflect on the intellectual shallowness of the architect.

We are heavily dependent on stereotypes. Mumbai, according to some is not the place for propah architecture. I am from Mumbai, and I did not know that I was committing an intellectual crime . I use computers, and that is yet another crime. After all, creativity cannnot come from the barrel of a computer. Speed or voluminous outputs are never equated with sensitivity. The list can go on.

I want to stress on what we stand to lose, if we do not protest against the status quo. There are two kinds of damages that can happen: People can get carried away into the maelstrom of words, without realising that there is no substance attached to them. This can result in considerable wastage of time, wading through empty words and empty promises. The repercussions that shallow intellectualism can bring in can be quite disastrous, and the originators of such shallow words would be quietly chuckling away at some socialite's party.

The second type of damage is also dangerous: There are the black sheep among the genuinely misled intellect, who make it a point to appear sufficiently intellectual that they are automatically herded to the politically acceptable corner of the room. We have seen them everywhere: They do bad architecture and worse hypothesizing but they are there to collect the rose from the chief guest, or hand a boquet to the person on the dias or whatever. The tragedy is that occasionally, they are asked to say a few words and I have noticed the young students trying hard to make sense of the gibberish coming out of the podium. A worse tragedy happens when the students actually manage to read some 'deep' meaning in those words.

I had recently been to an important get together of architects. Three whole days were spent in fun and frolic with just 5 talks which took up about 45 minutes each. Of the five, the only one which made sense and had an understanding of the 'deep' meanings of architecture was delivered by a Malaysian. The intellectual mafia in the audience was busy divided into two factions; where they were discussing some inane incident which made one group of architects boycott the proceedings and other such terribly important issues. During the meet, I met one pompous Indian architect who by the sheer association of having guided the Malaysian architect around had polarised himself and distanced himself from the rest of the crowd. He was so defensive of his position that he insisted that he was special and all of us who happened to be there,weren't. In fact, he never even bothered to ask us our names!

In the middle of this fracas, I noticed the John Does who were going around with a bewildered look in their eyes. I wanted to do something for them and hence this article. I have grown up in the midst of ordinary architecture. It had good parts and it had bad parts. Those memories are very important to me and if I ever grow up to be an intellect whose voice would be heard, I would like to contribute to and improve that very ordinary architecture that has sustained me. I know that the 'junta' architect over there (and I include myself) is busy caught in the survival cycle that envelopes people involved in ordinary architecture. They may not have any overt 'depth' in their attitudes, but whatever they are doing, I am sure they are deep enough.

I walk down the half built streets of Navi Mumbai, and I tell myself that sometime in the future my grandson would come to know about my association with the city which by then must have become old. I do not want him to see shallowness all around him and hang his head in shame. It brings tears in my eyes to see that nobody puts in just that little bit extra effort and improves ordinary architecture just that much more. By the time each one puts in their own mite, I am sure the city would grow up to a respected, and well loved place.

I've rarely seen that happen. Everyone involved in ordinary architecture is either caught up in the chakravyuh of daily life or they are simply apathetic and insist on mediocrity. In the middle of all this laisse-faire, there are also the really black sheep who would superficially dress up a building into a monument, and let the world be damned as long as their self-advertisement worked. I thought, the answers would be available from the so called intellectuals of our community and I tried attending as many architectural meets and get-togethers. Unfortunately, most architectural meets are centred around personalities; around people who went away into the 'gentle' rural area and produced architecture with 'deep' meanings; leaving the city to us, shallow people.

There are a lot of pressing problems that have to be solved before ordinary Indian architecture is not looked at apologetically. It is sad and pitiful that our works are not considered to be among the masters. We have to blame this squarely on the sorry state of our intellectualism. The whole world over, the intellectuals have contributed to the improvement of the whole lot of architecture, especially in their regions. They have not deliberately bowed towards the particular whims of specific personalities. Look at the various manifestoes of architecture that had appeared from time to time. They spoke to everybody. It is only here that the intellectuals are deeply involved in esoterica and petty politically motivated squables and spend large times securing their corner of the room. Even worse is the scenario where some misguided intellectual spends time in improperly constructed or quite irrelevant knowledge domains. (I have attended too many architectural meets where the speaker narrates with no obvious background reading to support his or her statements; or they invent spontaneous bursts of insight as they speak extempore. I had gone for one talk where the speaker told excitedly: "I was writing this lecture down last night, and my hand guided my pen and ran away with the ideas, and I am now narrating those to you..." )

I am not against the finer points of architecture. My sensibilities are devastatingly squashed by the schism being made between the carefully handcrafted, special architecture that is supposed to have deep meanings and the everyday, ordinary architecture.

We seem to be losing the capability of thinking about the fine shades of grey. Now we want blacks and whites. The One and the not-One; as Aristotle would have put it, seem to be the one that is ruling our lives. Buddha who used to sit smiling beningly in the middle is lost to us.

It is important to break out of the seducing hum of the so called 'deep' architectural thoughts. Everything is deep, and everything deserves an audience. We must first grapple with the complexity of architectural thoughts in such a breathtakingly complex country such as ours, before we start dividing them into convenient stereotypes. Let us get our priorities right. We need to be fair to intellectual exercises that govern the masses, along with the specialised subtletities. They deserve the same attention as those given to esoterica. We must have in depth discussions of management techniques, problems of style and identity, issues of standardisation, proper long-term business planning methods, methods for acheiving the ideals of architecture as we walk through the thicket of mediocrity, and many such issues. We have to get over the feeling that brilliant, intellectual insights can only come if we discuss 'deep' architecture.

Let this article be a warning to the shallow intellectual mafia of our country. The Indian architectural scene is slowly developing into a critical mass. I used to watch the match from the sidelines, but I cannot take it anymore. I'll try my level best to make it difficult for anyone to make waves in the intellectual circles simply because he/she speaks the right words. Even if it means that I become a 'majority' of 1. I am inviting all of you to participate in the discussion forum at http://www.archsfa.com on the Internet. We cannot be frogs croaking in one narrowminded well or develop isolated mutual-back-slapping clubs. With the Internet invading into India and India opening up to close scrutiny by outsiders, we simply cannot afford to mouth empty words.

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