smallprojects

We had a wonderful game back in the last office I worked in. Very much like the vivid vintage Hindi movies of old. If you remember, they usually started out with a god-fearing family, slowly worn down by the unfairness of life, disease, greedy landowners or evil overlords. Then, stricken by a polluted evil, the eldest son gets drawn into a life of crime, leaving his weary mother to care for the hobbled father and grandmother gone insane. The storm clouds gather, crops are ravaged and just as the deluge and hail are about to cast a final tragedy on the gathered gloom, the cherubic Hindu god with beetling eyebrows and googlie eyes drops from the sky and saves the day.

That was the game we played, the God Game.

The trick was for the director of the firm, the headman, the proprietor of the shop, to be above it all. Clean and disassociated from daily happenings, job to job. That's the way it worked in the office; I was a front liner, a foot soldier and wrestler sent out to wage the war of design gives and design takes. Never conceeding a cause just because the client held the say-so, fighting to the last design breath under the task of keeping to budget simply because we believed in what we did. And when the final confrontation happened, when clients fumed not being able to make headway with their demands, the director of the firm would descend like an angel of reason, translucent, peaceful and godlike, an entity of objectivity to take away the client's pain. 'These young impetuous architects', he'd say, 'passionate and just burning to do the best possible work'. Yes, the best work. Passionate. Just burning. What client could possibly argue with that?

Descending angels and passion. Takes one through storm clouds and polluted evil.