Role of an Architect: Lessons from the movies - Part 5
- Amit Jnagal, Senior Technical Architect, Infosys
In my last post, I talked about the movie Padosan and the lessons it held for Architects about observation, analyzing the non-obvious, taking care of your team, knowing your priorities etc.
Swades (Year of Release: 2004; Director: Ashutosh Gowarikar; Our Architect: Mohan Bhargav, played by Shahrukh Khan; Architect's Character: A Music Director by profession, US-based research scientist with NASA, of Indian origin).
‘Swades’ is a story of Mohan Bhargav, a research scientist with NASA. He has Indian origin but is settled in the US with a nice job and comforts of life. He makes a trip to India to see his grandmother when leads him to a village. During this trip, he gets a firsthand experience of life in rural India and how far behind they have been left from the ‘progress’ made by towns of the world.
As a first project, Mohan helps a bunch of villagers set up an electricity generating unit. Subsequently, he decides to move back to India for good and dedicate his life for the advancement of rural India.
There are three important lessons that this movie can teach architects:
• Giveback
• Giveback
• Giveback
I will refrain from going into the specifics of a few scenes for this movie, as the message is spread across the whole movie in bits and pieces.
As architects, we often forget to take a breather and give something back to our community, to our industry which has given us the fabulous opportunity to work and make living doing the stuff that we love enough to do for free.
At the end of every year, an architect should measure his/her success by the number of things he/she has given back in that year. The 'giveback' can take form of a class that you taught to budding architects, a paper that you published based on your experience to spread your knowledge or a novel item that you invented to aid the industry.
