You can take the man out of Pune
but you can't take Pune out of the man...
Pune, November 20: A bit of Pune remained inside
Nashik-born architecture student Yogeshwar Navagrah
when he went to the University of Calgary, Canada.
Laxmi Road with its open shopping area and walking down
Fergusson College Road with friends were etched so deeply
in his memory that he decided to incorporate it while
redesigning a suburban mall into a contemporary shopping
district in Calgary.
His new design fetched him the Mayor’s Urban Design Award
2005 in the student category. Navagrah, a student of
Environmental Design at Calgary, attributes his success to the
“vibrancy of Pune streets that make it a sought-after place
by people”.
“I selected this project because I didn’t find many places in
Calgary that I would love to go to as in Pune. The core concept
was creating a good street with lots of small shops and
restaurants,” says Yogeshwar, an Abhinav Kala Mahavidyalaya
graduate, who plans to use the skills gained in Canada in urban
design, in India.
Link
Pune images at Leitmotif
I had a rather fortuitous and intuitive introduction to Laksmi Road.
ReplyDeleteWhen I arrived in Poona (...a rose by any other name...) from Kenya on a rainy June day in 1970, Hindi was an ancient tongue.
The only Indian I knew was the Gujarati that I grew up with. My mother spoke fluent Gujarati. All the 'Indian' kids in our town were born in her hands. She was a mid-wife and her nurse on duty was called, Paris. A very different kind back in those days.
Anyway, I quickly had to learn to catch the No.4 PMT bus down Laksmi Road to a Maths Tuition Class. I remembered that ‘4’ was numbered like an '8', opened at the top. I remembered this by thinking, 1/2*8 = 4!
I hope to catch a bus down Laksmi Road in Jan 2006. Only this time around, I hope to have my wife and kids in the bag.
Down Memory Lane as they say. I already feel the excitement welling up.
Phil Pinto
An interesting bit of news. Apparently you have seen more of Laxmi Road than I ever did even though I grew up in Pune.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, you have always been a multi-culti guy, from out of Africa into India and beyond. I would like to know how the wait for the Laxmi Road bus goes for the Pinto clan...
Thanks for posting !