Early morning! Like me on the jog, even National Highway - NH 66 is warming up. We both are racing the vast space corridor connecting India, its cities & villages, people & culture, food & festivals. Neatly marked lanes & by lanes, graphics on speeds & turns, well-groomed streetscape & landscape, tall architecture & the quintessential bus shelter. The high point in the scene is but the pedestrian flyover with its amazing span stretching high across the speeding lanes, perched 56 risers or say 28 leap-strides for the sprinting-panting me, as I climb to cross over! What an exhilarating way to start a day; almost feeling that you own the world. Then I saw, ‘the King’ himself, sleeping in the skies.
At first, I thought it was 'garbage'. Closer, it was a Man. He was sleeping. On the most precious mattress any designer would have set for any billionaire ever – three/four newspapers where even the World’s most powerful office of President Biden to the latest stock exchange indexes waited still for his oblivious consideration. His blanket was special, a torn and faded rag softened beyond any silk with age and the warmth of some kind heart which offered it. Beside him was the richest treasury - a worn backpack with a bottle of water and banned plastic covers, popping out with priceless gems of a different kind like none of us would even dare to own. There he was... sound asleep; as only a man at peace with the world can. True King, the one and only democratic leader, with a clean sweep of the invisible and invincible 86 per cent vote bank of the 8 billion people on this planet for whom the everyday struggle is the single point manifesto. A true leader who is humble (or humbled) to serve the rest of the 14 per cent unconditionally. Well, this Man is the only God we Designers need to invoke at the start of the Jubilee Journey of Inscape to explore how Design and its magic can touch people and change the World.
Paulo Coelho and his Alchemist will say, this was the Universe revealing the truth to me; the seeker in agony for a clue to my editorial for the Inaugural Folio of Inscape on 'The Spaces We Shape'. From that vantage point of a skywalk, I was shown a powerful perspective. How designers from every single stream - Urban planning, Architecture, Interior Design, Landscape, Lighting, Product and Furniture had all come together with many National Commissions and policymakers to Design this most democratic space, charting directions to shape our lives. How ‘Man’ literally lies in the core of it all; sometimes at the oddest of spaces, rolled as a question mark to shake us up. Human-centric; where Design definitions and disciplines, their lines and boundaries fade and transcend towards shaping beautiful spaces to shape hopeful people, to shape our happy tomorrows! This is the only Editorial foreword I want to pen as IIID sets out on this ambitious dream; the Golden Jubilee Rainbow Series of seven Inscape Folios.
Expectations are high; we will together meet them by making it passionately participatory, with you contributing to the dialogues.
