Line after line. After line. They are all lines after all.
In the first year of my college education, we were made to take two classes on calligraphy as part of our initial drafting course. The drafting studio was one of my favourite rooms. Going through a slim vaulted corridor you made your way up steps with risers much above the comfort level. You reached the floor above, gradually being welcomed by the light breaking in on your left through arched windows large and close together, restricted only maybe by a dusty mesh covering their full surface. On the other side was an old door, the type which still has a wooden beam running along the ground to complete its frame. You entered the great hall of a studio to yet again see those arched windows, smaller and scattered now, looking out into the ever busy Mall road with a skyscape of turrets and domes from Punjab University and Government college. Down below you could see Kims Gun sitting silently and lazily. You look up above and stand in awe under something you could have as easily missed out on no matter how many times you came into this room. The high ceiling is a dark varnished wooden structure with beems running across its shorter span, crowned at their ends elegantly. Centrally placed between the beams are subtly wooden ornamentations in floral patterns which in many lights might not even show. The plaster on the walls is uneven and even tearing down from certain places, and the fireplaces on the wall running both ways from the entrance door seem long since used. Yet thats the things with old places, something special, you would imagine that if you could listen so carefully, you might just hear it breathing.
Now in my third year I sit in a more avant garde of a building. Here the Architecture studios windows are long and rectangular. The ceiling is a matrix waffle slabs. However even with its plain flushed walls and standardized staircase, I'd express no complaints agsainst it despite though I might have many. So many times I've admired it from the adjacent courtyard, how firmly half of the 6 story structure receeds its terraces so firmly beside the solid face of mass of the other vertical half which make up the lecture theaters on the inside, only to be rendered weak and floating simultaneous by the terrace at its footing breaking its hold to the ground. Its in there, or atleast here where I have to eventually present my work. My work which is now based on numerous lines. Lines drawn out of shear will power to create and nothing else. Leaving behind my usual way of processing through extractions from the site, through an understanding of the surroundings or through the romantisicm of one philosophy or another. Just once I wanted to be selfish and create by instinctive imagination. So I started to scribble lines.
Gohar Kalam is a reknowned Calligraphy artist and a cheerful guy of sorts. Every now and then if you couldn't get how to pen down an alphbet or just to get a critique on your work, you'd make your way to the head of the class and sit down on the ground around him. Waiting for you're turn you would hear the many joyful stories he had to share as he multi-tasked at demonstrating. One such tale he told about 'Alif'. Alif is the first alphabet in the Urdu language, and the arabic script in general. During his own student years he had been taught by the great master Sadeqain. He narrated how many a times the entire excersize used to consist on endlessly and tirelessly practicing the very linear and vertical charachter of Alif with the sole instruction of, "Line mein jaan lao" (Give life to your line). Gohar Kalam would roar with laughter at this point, expressing the madness that would entail in trying to even minutely understand what the instruction meant. Behind Sadeqains' back the students would joke about the insanity of the instruction. Then Kalams gaze would stricken, as if into a flashback of realization and he would tell you how true his teacher had been in his insanity of bringing Alif to life. From the crowned top, bringing the reed pen down swiftly, moving off center in perfect flow to meekly curving the bottom to return it to its axis while ever so delicately lifting the pen away to bring about that perfect tip... mastery of such could bring about such a beautiful thing as the birth of symbol madepermenant as the ink dried into the paper. Just to hear the story and look at the old mans gaze was mesmerizing, but the intensity of the emotions attached must be so much more than I could possibly describe or even imagine for myself.
Endlessly I make lines. Initially, enough lines to try and bring myself into a trance, then more to bring out form from it. When I think about it sometimes I try hard to go insane. Insane into the making of the perfect line, to form that perfect structure, to bring, God willing, my architecture to life someday.