– H Masud Taj
The day architect B. V. Doshi died, an editor reached out to me to write him a tribute. Doshi excelled as a storyteller so I inscribed two quotations and submitted one. The other is below.
Reflecting, recently, on why I chose those two from countless other words of the loquacious architect, it began to dawn on me that those quotes resonated with my own writings.
Doshi’s “life is intangible” resonates with:
“My father would tell me, “Do not be distracted by the visible, for the intangible matters more. In life and death, what is right before our eyes is merely a gateway to the truth that we need to see, hidden in plain sight.” – Father Taught Me to Teach (2019)
Doshi’s “take away the role of architecture, look only at life” resonates with a birds-eye view in NY:
“Kayed hosted us on a 65th-floor unit of the Marriott. When I woke up in the morning, our daughter Zahra was silently taking in the aerial view of the city framing the forest, as the Martyrs Memorial had framed a tree. What throbs in the heart of architecture is not architecture.” – A Tale of a Tree (1981-2022)
So had I unknowingly succumbed to confirmation bias? The 13th century polymath Ibn Khaldun warned against partisanship as it obscures the critical faculty. In the 70’s a British progressive hard rock band’s song Look at Yourself had as its chorus: Look back and turn back / Look at yourself / Don’t be afraid, just / Look at yourself. The band named themselves Uriah Heep after the insincere character in Dicken’s David Copperfield echoing back his internal belief at his own ” ‘umbleness”.
Do the homages we render unto others be mere boomeranged beliefs? Are we mere artful ventriloquists?
As with many Norman French imports into Middle English, the initial “h” in homage was originally not aspirated. That old pronunciation has returned, as you either pay “homage” or pay “an ‘omage” (the “h” is silent) or in the literati’s French oh-mazh. Either way, who, I wonder, is the recipient of that payment?
Author’s Note: The essays Father Taught Me To Teach and A Tale of a Tree as well as the calligraphic plates Life by B. V. Doshi ("I realise that life is intangible, says eminent architect B. V. Doshi" by Durganand Balsavar, The Hindu. July 22, 2017) and Take Away by B.V. Doshi (Pritzker Prize Obituary) may be downloaded from Academia.
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This author in The Beacon
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