You won't know it till you experience it

"I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart for so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can be together all the time." I realised one thing through the course of my life so far. You can never teach anyone anything. When people say life is an experience, they are right. Only experiences teach people lessons that they will carry forward with them for the rest of their lives. I guess, until it happens to you, you never know how it feels and no one can ever expect you to either. Everything is emotion or experience related. When we give someone advice to prevent them from getting hurt or doing something that they would probably regret, the advice only become wise words for them. It is not something that they will understand the meaning of. Lately, a lot of people have been reassuring me that they are there for me. I have never gotten the amount of support that I have got in the recent years and I am very grateful for it. But though I know that there are a lot of people I can count on, it doesn't stop me from feeling lonely. It't not the physical feeling of being lonely, its a feeling that I can't explain to anyone. It's a combination of anger, frustration and being upset. I don't want anyone to understand how I feel because for that to happen, they would have to go through similar things themselves and that is something I wouldn't wish for anyone. 

I remember as a child, I used to speak to my parents about how we were a very different family from all the others I knew. For starters, my parents were the coolest people I knew, literally. My mother used to wear hot shorts and a sleeveless top, sunglasses with a beer in her hand and race me up and down the beach in Alibaug. She beat me every single time no matter how old she was. She would scare me at times by saying things that I never thought parents would say to their children especially their daughter who lives in an Indian society. My parents were ahead of their generation and way ahead of the mindset of their counterparts. Both my parents being only children and me also being an only child, were close knit. I still haven't come across a single other family that has family dynamics like mine. To compensate for not having siblings, my mother got me a dog when I was a year and a half old. That dog became my best friend, my companion and my brother. As I grew up, I taught him how to say please, how to climb onto the bed (which he very rarely did) and a few other commands. In return, he taught his four year old companion how to crawl under the bed and how to growl. I was a happy child. I didn't want siblings. Instead, by the time I was six, I had three dogs. After moving to school and college, I used to speak to my mother every day. And her conversations always started with "hi babes" even if she had already spoken to me twice before on the same day. My father and I used to discuss issues that needed to be resolved and put our head together to find the best solution to whatever needed to be addressed. Both my parents taught me what is right and wrong, but never told me exactly what to do. "Make decisions that you know are right for you and the people around you" I was told.

From everything that I have been taught and gone through in life, there is one thing that I have learnt for sure. No matter how difficult things might get or how easy they may seem, the best way to learn anything in life is to experience it. Not to show sympathy to someone or to empathise with someone but to experience everything first hand. It makes you stronger and it makes you hold your head higher. A lot of my friends lately haven't been happy with what they are doing. Either it is because it is something that they didn't expect or there is something else that they would rather do. But most of them have told me instances in which they have learnt something from what is happening around them. It is something they are glad that they now know about and something that has taught them something new. Now that I have finished my MBA, I often wonder why I joined it in the first place. Sometimes, when I think back, the last two years have been a blur. I hardly remember any of the classes or what was taught in them. But the things I do remember is the different people I encountered and made friends with. These two years were an experience that I wouldn't like to trade with any other. From being absolutely against doing an MBA to being thankful I finally did it, is a journey that is a string of experiences - some good, some not so good, but all of them worth my time. There is nothing in this world that beats what first hand experiences can teach. 

Design, Change and Me - A post written for the India Design Project

Design – the word I heard the most as I was growing up. The meaning of the word changed for me multiple times. As a child, it used to be something that my parents spoke about very often, and discussed over dinner, when they weren’t too busy telling me to swallow my food and “get on with it.” It became a topic that I had witnessed several people have arguments about, as I pranced around the corridors of NID as a child. The conversations I used to overhear revolved around juries, assignments, diploma projects, graduate shows and convocations. I used to wander in and out of the Foundation and Exhibition design studios, watching students working on their projects, listening to music and discussing things with their mentors, two of them being my parents, Nilam Iyer and Siddhartha Ghosh. Several students used to tell me that they were petrified of my mom because she was strict and a perfectionist of sorts. I used to wonder what they were talking about until one day I understood what they meant.I was sitting in the Foundation classroom (which had no walls at the time) and doing my homework, while my mother was conducting a class. Her students were working on their assignments and she was walking around checking their work with a magnifying glass and a ruler. One student called out to her saying he had finished. As she was checking his work, she pointed out to a line he had drawn and said, “this is half a centimeter off the centre, do it again” The students sitting around him exchanged glances and started rechecking all their measurements. Sitting in the corner I wondered how many times the students had to work on their assignments if she didn’t approve of them. On the way home, I asked her why she wanted everything to be so perfect and why she couldn’t just let people be.“You can’t make mistakes when it comes to measuring. They are in a design course for heaven’s sake. If they can’t calculate and measure properly, what’s the point?” she said. I had nothing to say. That day, for the first time in my life, I was glad she didn’t teach me.My father had the most amazing handwriting and everyone knew about it. Wherever I went, people used to tell me how they admired his handwriting, and of course, considering I had horrible writing at the time, it annoyed me. His love for calligraphy used to reflect in the different projects he used to undertake, and the things he used to teach me about presentation. Design was a very integral part of both their lives and was something that both of them held very close to their heart. Be it designing the exhibitions at museums for my father or working with leather, wood and making educational toys for my mother, they were both passionate about design and their work. Design and the understanding of it has changed a lot in the last decade. I remember when I was in school and people used to ask me what my parents did. At hearing the phrase, “they are designers” everyone used to assume that it was fashion designing that their profession entailed. These days, people understand that there are more fields in design than just fashion and they are aware that each sector is becoming increasingly important as the times change.NID as an institute has changed over the years in several ways – the aura of the place, the attitudes, some of the infrastructure and certain procedures, but then again so has design. Designers today, from various colleges and coaching centers across the country, understand design in a different way than what the traditionalists taught and were taught by their mentors. It reflects strongly in their work and attitude towards it. From becoming an extremely creative field, I am starting to feel like there are restrictions being created around design. In my own communication design class in college, I am stunned by the kind of things I was being taught. Design elements are important, but so is creativity. Everyone cannot be called a designer if they are doing the exact same thing as everyone else. NID, back in the day, used to have large open classrooms, whereas now, there are temporary walls and cabins that replace those airy classrooms. It is almost like drawing a box and asking one to think inside it and be creative at the same time. I love seeing the displays in NID where so many of their faculty and ex-students are honoured or visiting NIDUS to see what shape design is taking today. Of course, there is a strange and unsettling feeling of not seeing the old familiar faces smiling at you in the long corridors of the building, but everyone changes or goes some day. It’s the legacy that they leave behind that matters.