Ramadan

This is the third year I fast in London. I’ve been fasting since I was around 12 years old, and it’s basically a part of my life. It cleanses my soul and pallete in more ways than one.

I suppose it’s pretty fitting that I should be working on a competition for the charity orginisation, Architecture for Humanity. It’s a great little project, basically a small stadium. The stadium is situated in one of the worst striken areas of AIDS in the world. Believe it or not the entire project needs to be constructed for $5000, which is a feat of it’s own. The below image is my sketch idea for the stadium interior. The entire design team comprises Ana, Sreejit and myself. What’s great about this is that we really feel absolutely fantastic after the fact, even though we’ve spent a good 7 hours working on it solidly, after a good 7.5 hours at work.

I’ll hopefully post some of the sketches I did for this project on monday or something.

And to a certain extent that’s one of the lessons of Ramadan. Human compassion. Learn for one month a year, learn and understand what it’s like for you to actually be poor. You’ve got absolutely everything in front of you to taste, drink whatever, and yet you can’t even touch it. For those in the dark about these things, fasting is when a person consumes no food or drink [yes including water] from sunrise to sunset.

Happy Ramadan to all those out there in the world.