ART DECO

The building had recently been 'done up'.   What was surprising was that it was Art Deco and the date, 1935, was emblazoned on the front facade.  This part of Vadodara has many houses dating from the period and one by one they are being pulled down to make way for multi-storey high rise, feature-less, apartment blocks.  Mumbai has the largest number of Art Deco buildings outside of Miami !

The style sprang from France, but quickly took off around the world, as the epitome of new world elegance and geometric refinement, daringly favouring colours often considered brash and the outlines of buildings proclaiming a new world... of ocean going liners and faster cars,  exploring new materials, such as plastic and glass.  Windows and doors with geometrically curving shapes, celebrating the rhomboid, hexagon and cube or starbursts such as the Chrysler Building and Empire State in New York.

What motivated this extraordinary global style of radicalism - never to be seen again ?  Coming after the First World War, it seems to be a tribute to hope and celebration, which sadly declined again in the 'Forties.  And its heirs - what has again expressed this kind of joy and giddy unconventionalism with a radical asymmetry .......the glass and steel structures of Dubai and the Middle East ?

THE BUILDING OF INDIA

In every part of the country, multi-storey buildings are being erected with breathtaking speed and the skyline seems to change by the day as workmen do a balancing act, their lives dependant on the strength of the bamboo and rope under their feet ! 

VAASTU SHASTRA

"She looked a bit odd, but it was good to have her assess our home - I was worried about bad vibes and magnetic currents"  she said.  We were sitting round a lunch table at Mainland China.  This was the Expat. group lunch - she was from the North of India but had lived in the U.S. for some years.  With the downturn in the economy in the West, she and her husband had returned to India - he.... to work for the family company.

I had always thought their house had a somewhat gloomy air about it, one always felt on edge and never quite comfortable - too much furniture crammed into rooms which were small and dark - the effect was cloyingly 'cute' and I wondered who she had consulted.  It turned out to be a Vaastu expert.  According to the revered art of Vaastu, written about in ancient Indian texts, a house should be orientated in a certain direction and beds should face in a particular direction - even the position of doors and windows is important.

Talking to an architect about the science of Vaastu, he maintained that there was a lot in it, but he also declared that if you took into account the climate and adapted your house design to best fit in with this and the position of the sun, neighbourhood, etc., your house design would automatically fulfil the criteria of Vaastu.  In India, being an exceedingly hot country, a house should not face East or West, because the full brunt of sunshine would then heat the house like a microwave oven.   Being sensitive to your environment, is what Vaastu is all about. According to Vaastu, beds should face East.....towards the rising sun !

But what advice would be given to someone whose house was wrongly orientated ?  What if the axis of rooms was wrong ?  Move ?

CONTEMPORARY HOUSE FOR LIVING

She was a well known and successful artist, he was a colourful and well known architect.   I was to have tea with her and look at her house, as an example of contemporary architecture.  She and her husband had collected antique features from houses in the Old City and had them incorporated into a modern structure....

I gave the address to the driver, knowing that it would take a long time to find the house in the warren of streets.  We drove down one lane after another without any luck - in desperation, seeing a man on a street corner, we stopped to ask directions for the umpteenth time - to my surprise he wore a cap with a slogan in bright red,  saying "I love Jerusalem"!  Just another of the non-secqueters which enliven a day in India.

The artist's paintings are filled with stoical women, locked into their own private world of suffering, who look out at the world uncompromisingly.  They are set within an easily accessible pattern of design and colour and one can observe them from this more palatable vantage point.  Her style is unchanging and each painting presents a variation on this theme - an unquestioning balance - which seems to be the crux of life in India.

The architect had cleverly used this concept in his design for contemporary living.  The antique features of wooden cantilevers, corbels, balconies and staircases from a bygone age, had been placed within a modern framework of exposed brickwork which was used to create its own rhythm of patterns.  The old idea of courtyards letting in light and air had been used to enhance the main living space and the bedrooms upstairs, too, had their own balconies which looked across at each other and overlooked the main courtyard.  With a canopy of green trees, this was an oasis for contemporary living, a secluded corner in a hot and dusty city.

WHERE THERE'S SMOKE....

Smoke rose up and filled the air.  Wood was piled on each individual fire and the faithful threw in their libations of ghee and spices.  The smoke from so many fires, filtered up through the bamboo structure and rose as a huge cloud, filling the air of the neighbourhood and beyond, with the unmistakeable aroma of cooking fat.  "It's very auspicious, it purifies the air"  he said with satisfaction.  I couldn't help wondering why the odour made me feel physically sick and induced a headache.  I wondered afresh at how they could spend so many hours in the heat and dust, tending the fires.  But then, here, in this culture,  I am struck every day with the triumph of man's spirit over material hardship and the will to survive against all the odds.  Their devotion to a concept beyond physical reality, is what defines them.  

POOJA ON A GRAND SCALE

The structure, entirely made of bamboo, had gone up over night.  It's sheer size was awe inspiring and added to this is the fact that it is temporary and once the pooja is over, the entire creation will be dismantled.  The apex is important for it's religious significance and even the smallest family shrine will have this feature, because, as it was explained to me, Hindus believe ultimately in one God, but because this concept of infinite power, is difficult for the average person to comprehend, their mythology is filled with many different aspects of the one divine power, in the shape of thousands of Gods and Goddesses.

Despite the heat of the summer sunshine, the masses converged on the scene - boys carried large pieces of wood for the individual fires deep within the structure.  The pooja was in honour of Laxmi, the Goddess of Wealth.  Smoke rose up in clouds, as the many fires were fed with ghee and spices.  Chanting filled the air as people walked round the structure in a clockwise rotation - the more times the better.  Its objective is purification - ridding the self of negativity and drawing wealth and good things into your orbit - definitely a cause for celebration.