Just like lakhs of other young folks, I too entered college with high hopes and ambitions for my bright future, my eyes beaming with joy. The moment you enter architecture school, you can easily categorize freshers into two types: people belonging to the first kind deliberately chose this field and are pretty passionate and over-enthusiastic about architecture and the other kind are those who wanted to do engineering initially but the universe had other plans for them.
While the people falling in the latter category were already pulling their hair and were clueless about what they were getting into, I belonged to the former type. I knew from day 1 that the next ‘Wakanda’ city would be designed by me. This architecture school was a step up in getting closer to my dreams. After a couple of lectures on different subjects, there came the main one, the subject which decides your worthiness of being an architect, or so I thought – the Design Studio. I was all buckled up and only if I had the audacity, I would have told the teacher to bring it on and tell us the design problem so that the world can witness a masterpiece designed by me. Well, turns out the first design exercise wasn’t going to be about designing a particular building, it would be a ‘creative exercise’ to get our ‘artistic juices’ flowing. Well, so the world would have to wait a bit more. The design professor wrote a couple of words depicting emotions, like ‘pain’, ‘happiness’, ‘fear’, etc. We had to choose a word and depict the same through a sketch.
The first word that I chose was ‘Pain’. It is pretty clear by now that I was the over-enthusiastic kind, so obviously, I needed to draw something that was very evidently ‘painful’. And so, I drew a girl with screws on her head and barbed wire on her neck, holding a knife trying to cut small pieces of her face, blood dripping down her neck. If you think my words are too graphic, then oh lord! you should have seen my drawing. I know I sound like a lunatic, but trust me, I am a good and responsible citizen. Well, in my defense, I was just doing what I was told to do! The sketch was so graphic that not only did I depict pain, I also made everyone who looked at the photo cry in pain. The icing on the cake was that I was extremely proud of my accomplishment and grinning from ear to ear as I called my design teacher to have a look. The look on her face and the horror in her eyes after seeing the sketch is beyond words. She literally cried in pain. See where I am getting at? The pain was everywhere. She said and I quote, “I appreciate that you have come up with something. But don’t you think this is a very loud visual depiction of pain? You could have drawn an eye with a drop of tear and that would have been a much toned down and subtle way of showing pain.”
I was awestruck, she was in fact right. I never really thought that way. It took me a millisecond to realize how far I’ve gone with this depiction and another millisecond to realize the pain and the embarrassment it caused.
That night, I contemplated hard whether I took the right decision to pursue architecture.
Well, fast forward 7 years, I’m a licensed architect with a specialization in healthcare architecture and looking forward to a great career. It’s too soon for me to decide whether I’m successful or not but I sure look forward to this adventure. Architecture for me is more of a journey than the final destination. You meet new people, you come across new ideas, you experience different design processes, sometimes you fight hard to defend yourself, sometimes you’re surprised by someone else’s point of view and think why you never thought of it that way, but every day, every single day, you learn and grow. The only thing that stays constant in this profession is the constant need to introspect yourself and your ideas.
So, all the aspiring architects in their first year or final year, fresh architects, architects facing a mid-life crisis, architects spending sleepless nights to convince their clients for this final revision, and so on, never lose hope. You may do blunders and experience failure or even doubt your abilities someday, but all that you are experiencing today is preparing you for tomorrow. The journey can be a rather ‘painful’ one but you pick yourself up and start afresh and if you’re consistent with what you do and what you believe in and keep improving and becoming a better version of yourselves, then nothing can stop you from being a star architect.
This is for all the architects out there, a subtle reminder to laugh away their pain and enjoy the fruits that this architectural journey has to offer you.
