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An epic meeting of two worlds |
Ayaz Bazrai
A retired revolutionary, festival organizer, Free Internet activist on a head-on collision course with a grand old professor of architecture, extraordinary teacher and revolutionary in his own right. The kind of meeting that can only happen in the most optimistic recesses in our imaginations. Or at an UnBox event.
In our half-developed initial discussions on the Dark Temple of Dis-connectivity, an offshoot of the Connected Communities theme at the latest UnBox Caravan, we witnessed this mad collision firsthand. Our Dark prophet Vladan Joler and our blossoming entourage had been developing this idea of a place for frequency silence, an almost Zen-calm-experience of nothingness on the insanely cluttered information superhighway. It seemed loosely resonant with our group, and there was a palpable sense, right from the first post-it provocation that we were on to something that seemed like a life’s work. To return to calmness, create a dark island within the fast flowing river of information, a significant blot on the busily bouncing network maps, seemed really fascinating to explore.
With this half formed idea we entered Professor Neelkanth Chhaya’s Ahmedabad office. We saw him on a table unlike anything we expected. He sat there with a large sheet of paper, working craftsman-like with a pair of scissors and Sellotape. “I’m remixing my old plans of older structures, cutting and pasting parts so I can plagiarize my own work” he said and smiled at us. After all these long discussions on signal jamming, PCBs and the vast abstract of the Internet, this sight just made the contrast even more pronounced.
The freewheeling talk that ensued had us sequentially in stunned silence, in rapturous laughing sprees, in gleeful chuckles as new perspectives were thrown up in those incredulous eye-rolling whooaaaaa-did-he-just-say-that moments. What was actually a two hour interaction felt like it had somehow shifted the huge inertia laden gears of my mind to direct me towards a whole new direction. It’s almost meaningless to attempt a summary of what happened, and what I was left with was the true sense of a massive shift. Maybe the way a city feels after the last tremors of a massive earthquake have subsided. And it’s a feeling that’s physically experienced. None of us had too many words to describe what we’d felt, which I guess is almost a barometer of a truly formative experience.
What we felt will now probably become a lifetime of work.
From among the incessant madness of my everyday life, from the midst of all the clutter and chaos, this singular experience of the conversation is my own Dark Temple. For us to see eye-to-eye and have an egoless contribution with a teacher of his stature, for him to excitedly tug at his beard (a universally acknowledged sign that he thought your ideas had merit), for us to scribble ballpoint- pen blasphemies in his pristine sketchbooks, and come out of it with a feeling that we’d together thought something that none of us entered the room with, that to me is the essence and grammar of UnBox.
And that to me is the potential of our own Dark Temple. Many thanks guys. You are creators of magic, and connectors of dots.