Architectural Tantrum

A visceral interpretation of a pencil sketch, where a crumbling building becomes a powerful metaphor for a mental breakdown and the chaotic, resilient spirit of Calcutta. An exploration of defiance in art and life.

7/25/2025

Here’s my architectural tantrum then: not a mere building, nor yet architecture, but a bleeding, screaming breakdown in brick and mortar—a goddamned hissy fit, if ever one was committed to paper. What I’ve drawn isn’t something static but something caught forever mid-spasm, mid-collapse, mid-fuck-you-I-will-not-stay-put—esque protestation against architectural sanity itself.

There it stands—if “stand” can even be allowed here—wobbling, leaning, sneering, shaking its bony fists at gravity, physics, and perhaps even Spinoza’s god, if he’s still around this side of entropy. It’s a joyous fuckery, a pencilled revolt of lines and edges against rulers, architects, and every well-intentioned fool who insists walls must stay straight, corners must stay sharp, and buildings must meekly submit to geometry.

Look again, closely, at that gloriously chaotic wreckage. The windows—good bengali bourgeois ones, the kind I can imagine with lace curtains concealing flabby belligerent women, whose sole purpose in life is gossip and complaint—who must utterly be unbothered by the reality of their reckless refuge. They stare out loftily at the neighbors, peering disdainfully down, denying reality like an uncle deep into his third peg of Old Monk, boasting loudly about the strength of his liver even as his knees tremble beneath him.

Down below, it’s a different story. A lower half more bruised and battered, plaster hanging like loose, peeling skin from old wounds that refuse healing. The ground floor looks worn out, pissing bricks, doors dangling off hinges like teeth loosening in an aging mouth. Its indignities are public, spectacular, and thoroughly Bengali—the bottom half, like every Calcuttan tenement, a victim of bureaucratic indifference, municipal fuck-ups, and generations of optimistic neglect.

Yet, with sublime irony, the upper floors still pretend decorum, holding onto dignity by the brittle skin of their teeth, their arrogance etched beautifully and proudly in the slanting balconies and slightly smug windows. An undeniable metaphor for a culture that passionately believes tomorrow must always be better even if yesterday was unquestionably worse.

So what does my pencil-sketch tantrum truly reveal beneath its proud crumbling façade? It reflects that impossible, irrepressible, insufferably bengali resilience—born from stubbornness, tempered by daily absurdities, and nourished by chaos. This house—an architectural meltdown scribbled in insolent graphite—mirrors precisely how we, as bengalis, confront reality: never fully upright, rarely entirely collapsed, always somehow teetering between tragedy and comedy, between brilliance and bedlam.

It isn’t falling apart—it’s hanging together, dammit, in precisely the style bengalis perfected long before Marx made dialectics fashionable. My sketch isn’t merely an angry scribble—it’s an eloquent architectural rant against the neat tyranny of straight lines, against predictability, against the hopelessly unimaginative mediocrity that would chain every wall upright and lock every door squarely shut.

If beauty can lie in defiance in harassment of sensibilities, my architectural tantrum stands glorious—irreverent, untamed, and bengali through and through.