Of Onions, Turnips

No complaints though. Skip the architectural academese, specifically the last chapter incorporating knowledge nuggets like these: "The natural process was a corrective process, it was unselfconscious and self-organising. Form making was really a process of subsystems. All the subsystems were interlinked yet free from each other, they were dependent and yet independent."

Or again: "The whole was a sum of parts and the part was a unit of the whole, or a subtraction from it if the idea of the whole existed. You got space by addition or subtraction. Additive architecture had the concept of the sub whole, but subtractive architecture did not because it contained the idea of the whole. So we had to look at parts that were wholes and wholes that were sub wholes" Phew! Get off that jargon juggernaut. Stop lecturing, start writing Architect Ahuja.

So like I suggested skip some bits and read the others if you want to enjoy this book. Like Ahuja's interesting revelation that Lutyens' Delhi was built by everyone but Lutyens: Herbert Baker built the Parliament and secretarial blocks, Medd built the churches, Nicholls designed Connaught Place. Read it for architectural anecdotes revelatory of Lutyens' contempt for the building styles that contributed immeasurably to the beauty of his monuments. Apparently, he described Indian building styles thus: "Hindu: Set square stones and build childwise but before you erect carve every stone differently and independently, with lace patterns and terrifying shapes. On top over treadbeated pendentives set an onion."

As for Mughal style: "Build a mass of rough concrete, elephant wise on a very simple rectangular-cum-octagon plan, dome in anyhow cutting off square. Overlay with a veneer of stone patterns, like laying a vertical tile floor and get Italians to help you. Inlay jewels and cornelian if you can afford it, and rob someone if you can't. Then on top of the mass put three turnips and overlay with stones or marble as before." Delicious asides on Corbusier and interesting insights on the inherent inadequacy and irrelevance of his much-touted architectural style in India (of which Chand-igarh is the supreme example) make for a rewarding read.

As for the streets... well. Ahuja fails somewhat in capturing the breathless hurly burly, the tremendous/trivial, magical / farcical , chaotic/ordered, disordered/designed, burlesque/bizarre, high drama that sustains, signifies and often defines streets in this country.

Jaipur, Lucknow, Benares... Ahuja meanders through but quite fails to evoke the splendid pageantry and beauty, the wondrous whirligig of Indian streets that often delights, amazes and seduces the unsuspecting wanderer and is the secret of their enduring charm. To conjure rather than collate, to realise rather than recount, to evoke rather than enumerate is the business of the writer. Not the architect. Ahuja remains an architect.