Life under construction

Soon after my birth in Bhopal my parents brought me to Durgapur where my Dad worked in Durgapur Steel Plant. We used to lived in a small township in a small house provided by DSP.

Durgapur under construction

As I grew up I saw my town grow into a budding city. I saw woods in front of our government housing being felled to create residential complex. I saw truck and lorries piling mountain of bricks and sands and cement on the cleared sites. It was a dream come true for the children in our locality. We used to spend hours playing in the mud, digging tunnels through the mountains of sand and cement and searching for our slippers and shoes lost in the sand piles. At dawn our favorite game was hide and seek in the newly constructed hollow buildings. It used to take mom an hour to wash away dirt from my scalp, ear, nose and nails !!

Since then we have moved to bigger appartments (after every major promotion of dad) and I have played with every brick and every pile of sand and cement which went into their construction.

Even after I grew up to my teens, too old to play in dirt, the trucks, lorries and road rollers were still ubiquitous in Durgapur. It was nice to see the next generation of kids still playing the same sand games in the construction sites. I sometimes used to join them to revive old memories and teach them the art of digging deeper tunnels in sand piles.
It seemed that my town will be forever under construction.

Bangalore under Construction

When I got admitted in Ramaiah, Engineering college in Bangalore I was glad to leave the small developing town to live in a fully developed city. However, little did I know that even this hi tech city was trying to rebuild itself to compensate for the population explosion (due to software and telecom revolution). So the the first thing I see on my arrival in Bangalore is renovation of the Central Station. Then I saw roads being widened and the ones which could not be widened anymore getting converted into oneway lanes. New Malls and resdential complex were springing up every week and new restaurants and bakeries ever day.

Even Ramaiah cammpus was not aloof from the reconstruction mania. The Electronics Department had just been demolished and a new building for Electrical Sciences was under construction. At the end of my first semester I saw my Mechanical Engineering Departmental Building go into rubbles. And for the next four years we never had our own department. We had to share facilities with Civil and Electrical Engineering.

Mechanical Photoshoot infront of Electrical Sciences Building

We lived in the students hostel with a constant threat that soon the hostel will be demolished and hostelites will be asked to evacuate the place. The threat was real. Because somehow despite refurbishment of the entire university, the hostel was always the most neglected section on the campus. The rooms were never repaired despite complaints of leaking walls during monsoons. The dirt road in front of the hostel was never repaired and the parking space for hostelites never constructed. What they did instead was constructed a new Degree College right next to the hostel which brought more dirt and dust into the hostel premise.

We had heard rumors that founder chairman of Ramaiah Institute was cursed/blessed with eternal prosperity only if he never stops constructing. So Ramaiah demolishes and reconstructs existing building if there is nothing else to construct !!

TU Delft Under Construction

I came to TU Delft again expecting that the university with world wide reputation will at least have a fully developed campus and facilities in place. Alas.... this is what I got : (pics to be uploaded)