What are we doing?

I had a day to kill in Chennai and was recommended by a friend to visit Dakshin Chitra, I liked the idea of having one place to see most of the architecture of houses in south India

The visit made me realize that - how we live now in comparison with our forefathers and also the huge space they utilized. . We now live clustered in blocks and use minimum space, especially in the cities and towns. But the fact is that the traditional houses which used to exist in the villages are also vanishing in a rapid phase.

The visit left a nostalgic feel - it reminded me of my traditional house in Mangalore built by my grand father, which now no longer exist and there stands a modern roofed house.

They obviously were huge houses since there were joint or big families living in; they required a bigger space for cooking and storage. And we now are nuclear families and require minimum space and don’t need big storage space and use modern amenities.

What saddens me that we now making replicas of our tradition and culture and also destroying our architecture and right now we are wiping out the existence of our history, and in reality we have a chance to preserve what we have.

(The first picture was my ancestral house in Mangalore, the second picture is a traditional Kerala house built in Dakshin Chitra)