Part I: How to be an Architect & Other Kitchen Appliances

When I was seven years old, one morning I sat up in bed and said to myself, 'I'm going to be an architect!' My mother who was in the kitchen dropped her mixing bowl and reached for a wet towel and a bowl of cold water. She then proceeded to enter my room, anticipating that I was running a temperature and began to piece together a maternal prognosis. My father who had just emerged from the prayer room scurried back in and re-emerged after fifteen long minutes with a nervous smile on his face. He sat next to me in bed and explained the events that had occurred the night before which may have caused my out-of-the-blue decision in taking a stab at the art of building and design.

He told me that I had been playing in the neighborhood cricket ground and as the match was winding down, a piercing strike from the batsman had yielded the cricket ball making sharp contact with my balmy head. I did not remember any of this, except slipping into a dreamland with candy and tall buildings which were incidentally made of asbestos. Someone who looked as inspiring as Corbusier was eating a ham sandwich and had a bag of Tostitos laid flat on his lap in the same sequence. Various LISP routines seemed to light up in thin air, execute, glitter and disappear.

My father added that I let out a short squeak and dove head first into the ground like a sack of potatoes fresh off of a Ralph’s truck; And then I didn't move. When they turned me over, my face looked like the error sign you frequently see when AutoCAD crashes. In those days one couldn’t contact Autodesk with a support request. Well, all versions look the same when they crash, don't they? A few similes later pretty much akin to my writing style; he asked me why I hadn't chosen computers like so many of my cousins or maybe medicine, law or perhaps the mafia? To whit, I answered that I had always loved to draw ever since I was able to hold a pencil. The only other purpose it served was to poke people in the eye that refused to play cricket with me.

So finally after much cajoling and bribery with immigration papers, I agreed to put that thought on hold until the day I was able to watch 'Mary Poppins'. A few years passed and my dreams of becoming an architect went through several stages of metamorphosis. Sometimes I wanted to be a bus driver, a postal department employee harasser, an anarchist, a Bavarian folk dancer, a break dancer, ventriloquist, a left-handed ambidextrous burger patty flipper and every now and then, a candidate on the other side of a USCIS desk at the airport. As the years rolled by a lot of these dreams were fulfilled in bits and pieces.... except for becoming an architect. Then came 1993.... And Cable Television in India.

................ To be continued.