One of the first assignments that we did as part of Architecture school was to use a ten by ten cm cardboard with a white background as a canvas and stick small ‘punch’ dots and narrow strips of black paper on it with a glue stick. The directions were clear. There would be no restriction to the number of the dots and stripes we could stick onto that cardboard square. There was also no guiding instruction to what ‘pattern’ or ‘design’ we were to create. Being the first year students that we were, none of us had a clue why we were doing this exercise and it was pretty much a surprise to be made to do things without ‘rules’ so to speak. For example, in school, essays always had a ‘number of words’ limit set which had to be adhered to. After the initial confusion died down, more so after the guy teaching us told us to be completely free, we got down to the task of ‘creating’ something out of seemingly ‘silly’ tools. No one probably imagined that such an exercise could be part of a 5 year course that would enable us to visualize and design iconic architecture. A few stuck to the time-tested ploy of sticking to symmetry, creating patterns with the dots and stripes that resembled some kind of a twisted ‘rangoli’ or ‘mehndi’ design, while others focused on creating as much ‘disturbance’ as possible. It was a game to compare each of our ten square cm ‘murals’ with each other and try and imaging an object or an expression within the random stripes and dots. Finally, we realized, at the end of it, that what we were creating were in fact ‘compositions’. Which in turn led to a long debate on what exactly consists of a ‘composition’. Words such as harmony, flow, rhythm, emotion, balance were thrown about as easily as loose change, without it impressing much upon the minds of us novices. Just as it is difficult to teach a kid to appreciate world cinema, it was difficult for us to understand why a Hussain painting fetched so much on the arts market while others who painted nice landscapes to adorn your living room didn’t. At the end of it, all of us were told that by exposing ourselves to varied forms of art, we would eventually develop an eye that could discern between the mundane and the creative, and learn to recognize true creativity, that we would in fact grow more sensitive as we progress and channelise our thought process to think more, think differently, and yes, think ‘out of the box’, as the jargon goes. In the coming years, it was amazing to witness the output of 30 students from varied background collectively create so much of output, through wooden sculptures, through clay murals, through water colors and pencil sketches…simple architectural designs to complex landscaping, skews and Bauhaus’, all of it was a collective repository of thoughts leading to output leading in turn to further thoughts. It also led to some weird things, like one student opting to spend extend periods of time ‘meditating’ and living like a ‘hermit’. Others got hooked to drugs, alcohol or tobacco. Some were disillusioned with the process of starting with something completely abstract and then converting them into built space that was habitable, while others stuck to grids and practical architecture. It was a curious mix of ideas, each of us learning more from the students than from the teachers who merely facilitated this learning process by introducing us to involving design briefs and literature.