18th June, 2025: An Architect’s Journal Entry

It was a beautiful monsoon morning, the dew still resting on the leaves undisturbed. The fog had just started to give way to the golden rays of the morning sun. As I stepped outside for my morning stroll, I sensed something different about the place. Everything looked the same, but somehow it felt like things were only about to get confusing from here on.

As I walked out of the compound walls of my house, I saw an old RD-350 pass by. I wondered

how long it had been since I’d seen one in such mint condition. To my surprise, the deeper I

walked into the town of Ooty, the more vintage cars I spotted. Trying to wrap my head around it all, I bought a newspaper for my father. The ground beneath me shook when I read the date: 18th June, 1995. That’s when it struck me— the town hadn’t changed. It looked exactly like it did when I was growing up.

Confused, awestruck and disoriented, I started walking back home. That’s when I remembered I had a meeting in Kotagiri for a design discussion with a client. I rushed back to make a few last-minute changes on my laptop. But to my utter shock, my workspace, once equipped with a sleek PC, had transformed into a drafting table with tracing sheets, a parallel bar and a set square. My iPad— usually loaded with all my conceptual sketches— had turned into a bunch of tracing sheets and a sketchbook.

I quickly rolled the sheets, grabbed a few more from the sheet bin where the printer usually was and looked around to make sense of the situation. Who better to speak to than my partner? I looked for my phone, only to hear a faint beeping sound, like that of an old digital alarm clock. Following the noise, I found a pager with a reminder to call my partner. I explained the situation to him over the call, and he rushed home, equally puzzled but concerned.

On the drive to the office, he asked if I was prepared for the meeting. I told him everything that had happened since I woke up. He asked me if I was still half asleep and to get it together as we were about to reach the office. I thought I’d seen weird things all morning, but God was I wrong! As I stepped out of the car with a million rolled sheets in my arms, I saw the street that my office was on, like the one in my dad’s old photo albums. Walking into the studio, I saw our accountant sitting surrounded by heaps of ledgers, letters and a calculator that was being abused. She greeted me with a smile and handed me a cup of filter coffee in a dawara set, no less.

Inside the design studio, the rolls I was carrying slipped from my hand and scattered onto the floor. The room buzzed not with the sounds of keyboards and mouse clicks, but the gentle whoosh of pencil on tracing paper, and T-scales gliding across tables. I saw my team laying their sheets flat on drafting tables, working like we used to in college. I see people lying on the floor to reach what they were drafting.

In one corner, two interns were buried in a pile of books. As I walked over to see what they were doing, I noticed a familiar title— Neufert’s Architect Data— surrounded by codes, standards and regulations. Upon asking, I learnt they were doing spatial requirement research for a new civic centre.

Another group was listing all the public seats in town from a telephone directory to make case studies. I remember thinking, “ Who even does that? What are we in? The really 90’s?? WE WERE!

The meeting had been pushed to a later hour, giving me a bit of breathing room. Back at my

desk, my PC was gone, replaced with only hand-drafted prints from the previous day. As I

unrolled them and fixed them on my drafting table, I spotted the changes I was meant to make. Only now, those changes would require a full re-draft. After some quiet denial and grumbling, I re-drafted it all by hand. My partner and I then listed everything we needed before the meeting. We wanted a scale model and a materials palette.

“A scale model? Isn’t that called a SketchUp model?”, I asked him. No— it was a physical model that we had to assemble like a Lego set. Though it sounded simple, it took hours. We didn’t use ready-made components. Instead, we cut, glued, burned our fingers on hot glue guns, and made a proper mess.

To finalise the palette, we needed to make a few site visits for materials and textures, so we split up. On coming back, the entire office had a smell, so I followed the smell into the back room, where the pantry had become a darkroom. One person was developing sheets in containers; another was laminating drawings. I asked how it worked— they showed me a blank sheet.

“Hold it under the shaft”, they said, and like magic, the paper turned blue with the drawing on it. The ammonia smell made the whole office stink. We loaded everything into the back of the van: the model, palette, drawings— everything. I had to hold the model like it was a baby. And off we drove.

The meeting was held at a beautiful estate on a hill, overlooking the lush green tea plantations of Kotagiri. No screens. No distractions. Just the sun streaming through the windows, catching the edges of our hand-drafted sheets and the roof of our model.

It was one of the most immersive meetings I had ever experienced. No phones, no buzzing

notifications— just architects, clients and ideas. We explained the design to a deeply interested and understanding client. The timing, the light, the silence— it all felt just right.

Driving back, I realised why I had chosen architecture. The research. The drawings. The

immersion. The disconnect from tech-heavy distractions. It felt honest. It felt human. It felt like a place where architecture could still be pure— just good conversations, curiosity and craft.

As we pulled into the driveway, the same RD-350 passed by again. This time, the hum sounded familiar. And from a distance, I heard my alarm.

As I opened my eyes, the date read: 18th June, 2025.

Sitting up, unsure of what had just happened— dream or deja vu— I noticed my drafting table.

On it: a parallel bar, a butter sheet. I smiled. Somewhere in time, we never really left that world.