It was a piercingly cold morning. The uncouth clouds were perfectly cloaking the sun’s rays behind them. As I woke up to the sound of the mellifluous Tree Pipet from the nearby Gulmohar, I found my feet spontaneously walking towards the balcony. And lo, that was the first time when I was seeing one of the most astounding cities in India, Agra! The city of love was standing right in front of me, shining in all of its glory, detailing out every single nook and corner of the chowks, right from the tiny memento seller trying his best to gift the foreign travellers, their memories about this city through a ‘Taj Mahal‘ refrigerator magnet up to the hefty halwai boasting about his confectionery, ‘Taj Mithaiwale’. I quickly decided to grab my sketchbook and hoard onto a few vistas that the city had to offer me. Just then a gruff voice came through the door, startlingly waking up my roommates as well as crashing up my perfect morning. It was none other than Professor Chattopadhyay, who had come to give us all a friendly reminder in a not so friendly way, to get ready without further ado, as he did not want to miss out on showing any features of our next destination from this architectural tour, Fatehpur Sikri, just because the students were not ready on time.
The Advent
I started to sense the changes in and around me as we left Agra and gradually entered the ‘City of Victory’. The Mughal marvel arrived with an unmatched level of grandeur and augustness, taking all of us by surprise with its magnificent entrance, the Buland Darwaza. Before getting down from the bus we received the same old set of generic edicts such as maintaining the decorum while studying the structures and not to embarrass ourselves. Now, the daily routine of an architecture student is a bit different than any other student. As soon as we wake up we start working towards our sheets, and while eating we are parallelly deep searching on Pinterest for ‘ideas and inspirations’ as we like to call them and hide our form of plagiarism and then if time permits, we are allowed to sleep. Hence, a study tour, that too in a whole new city is a much-awaited break for all of us. Our work of mindfully observing the alluring daedal of some of the most famous reliquary situated in the old Mughal capital was as engaging and intriguing as it seemed at first but it came along with the sole distraction of our unbound inclination towards social media and an unstoppable need to click our pictures in such a one of its kind setup.
Professor Chattopadhyay
Soon after capturing the nuances of the wooden canopy encrusted with mother-of-pearl inlay mosaic inside the Tomb of Salim Chisti or at least pretending to capture it for a few minutes, we resorted to altering our goal of enhancing our design portfolios by a tinge to curating the next picture that would get featured on our Instagram accounts. Not much time had passed by before we began to hear Professor Chattopadhyay giving his piece of mind to my classmates saying, “You students of this new generation I say! Your hands always hinged on, and eyes glued to that smartphone of yours. We are here to learn something that cannot be known to us within the four walls of the studio. So you better stop modelling in front of this repository of wisdom and better make good use of this tour.”
Now let me help you get a clear picture of the kind of a man Professor Chattopadhyay was: Hair perfectly parted on one side as if Edward Scissorhands himself gifted him with this boon, except for replacing it with a comb instead of scissors, always having a grim look on his face that was coldly wrathful, wearing a flawlessly pressed set of a shirt as white as a ghost and pants that couldn’t be any more black, in search of an opportunity for rebuking on students, while giving a ‘redo’ being his favourite form of punishment.
The Patrolling
So one hand there was an old, rigid, architect turned professor, and a tour guide for his aid, and on the other hand, there were 44 architecture students, desperately wanting to feel validated on social media through their pictures, having a little less concern for the actual purpose of the visit. In order to get us back on track, he announced that there would be some serious repercussions if he caught anybody clicking their own pictures and started patrolling along with the tour guide in search of his next victims.
After some time, I switched back to studying the monument but once in a blue moon I would hear the professor from some corner admonishing a student. As we neared the end of our study, my friends and I started walking towards our bus and I suddenly heard the same gruff voice that had ruined my perfect morning, from across the bushes saying, “Make sure the light quality is good. It’s been a while since I’ve updated my Facebook cover photo.” My friends and I cautiously went towards the bushes and peeped up to see what was going on. Alas! It was none other than our very own ‘patrolling professor’ holding his arm in the sky, pinching his thumb and forefinger together as if he was lifting the Buland Darwaza all by himself while the tour guide was clicking his picture. And to put it in the words of Professor Chatopaddhyay himself, we students have our ‘hands hinged onto our phones’ anyway! So without much deliberation, unanimously, we all clicked a spectacular photograph just to make sure that we had an ace of spades when sir would discuss the reverberations of our behaviour for the day!
