Kohei sugiura biography of mahatma
Bringing History Home: National Salt Satyagraha Memorial at Dandi & Dandi marchers’ Sculptures Workshop at IIT Bombay
In 1959, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Nobel Peace Prize winner of U.S.A., came to India as a pilgrim. After a month’s travel in the land of Gandhi, on the eve of his departure, he was asked a cynical question at a press conference in Delhi. He was asked: Where is Gandhi today? We see him nowhere. The answer he gave is as relevant today as it was then, as it brings home to us why Gandhi continues to be relevant today and in the centuries to come. Dr. King’s reply was that Gandhi was inevitable. If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought and acted, inspired by the vision of a humanity evolving towards a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore him only at our own risk.
But ignore him we do, just as we ignore our history and the many thousands of nameless, faceless people whose courage and sacrifice gained us our precious independence. A lot of us who grew up on the staple diet of NCERT history books at least know of the famous Salt Satyagraha by Gandhi and his famous Dandi March. But dig a little deeper and you would draw a blank. We know next to nothing about the 80 marchers who walked along with Gandhi and even less about the Salt Tax and why picking up a fistful of salt from the sea was so revolutionary.
Dandi Marchers’ worshop at IIT Bombay
Thanks to the ‘National Salt Satyagraha Memorial at Dandi‘, a project of the Ministry of Culture, which selected IIT Bombay for the design, co-ordination, and implementation of this project, some of that history is being brought alive to us at IIT Bombay. We share some of the highlights of that project through a visual essay on the two Dandi Marchers workshops which just concluded in IIT Bombay campus and Ali’ baba’s column: ‘A fistful of Salt’. We hope that reading through it all will bring alive the mystique of the Mahatma a litt Self-Generated Data Patterns Recurring events leave their mark on physical objects - creating visible data patterns which rep... more Recurring events leave their mark on physical objects - creating visible data patterns which represent a processed summary of the event. The keyboard of a much used :: Tell us about your background and journey – a brief introduction. Kirti Trivedi is a professor at the Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Born in 1948, Trivedi obtained a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Indore (1970), and a postgraduate diploma in Industrial Design from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (1972). Later he studied at the Royal College of Art, London for his Master of Design degree in Industrial Design.
In 1981, he worked in several design offices and design schools in Japan, including the office of Kohei Sugiura as a UNESCO Fellow. He has been teaching courses in Graphic Design, Typography, Design Methods and Design History at IDC since 1976, and has been engaged in a project documenting the design traditions of India since 1981. In 1984, he initiated and started India's first Master's degree programme in Visual Communication at IDC. In 1989, he was awarded the Fellowship of the International Design Foundation, Ulm, Germany to work on the project 'Cultural Identity in Design.' He has edited and published the proceedings of a Seminar on Indian Symbology and a portfolio of contemporary Indian calligraphy.
Besides teaching, he is active as a design consultant in the areas of graphic design, book design, exhibition and museum design, and environmental graphics and signage design and product design. Some of his recent projects include design of a permanent exhibition on Mahatma Gandhi: 'My Life is My Message', at Sabarmati Ashram, Ahemdabad; design of permanent exhibitions on the life of Vinoba Bhave, and Jamnalal Bajaj at Gopuri, Wardha; and the design of CSIR India pavilion at Technology Showcase '95, Singapore; Setting up the R&D Centre and designing a range for chairs and other furniture for Amber System Seating, Mumbai; Singage for Vidhan Bhavan, Bhopal, and IUCAA, Pune.
He is most active as a book designer, designing books for prestigious publishing houses in India like Marg Publications, Mapin Publishing, and Osian's. His book designs have won Kirti Trivedi
computer, the buttons in an elevator, the patterns left on the beach by recurring waves, the wearing out of the grass on a jogging track or a cricket pitch, the greening of the land mass after the monsoon rains: all have much to tell if observed and
interpreted.
Such data patterns are self-evident, and they tell their story in a universally understood language. Study, observation and understanding of such self-generated, self-evident data patterns can be of great value to all involved in visual presentation of information. The main advantage of self-evident data patterns is that they don't need labels and legends to explain them; and are language-independent. Being visual they show the whole data pattern at a glance. Being directly created by the event, they also have great density of detail, as contributed by the various parameters of the event.
Existing both as static marks, and as dynamic data taking shape and unfolding naturally in real time, self-generating data patterns are a direct result of the data creating event. They don't go through the cycle of collecting verbal information about an event, classifying, processing and organizing it to show relevant data patterns, creating a visual representation of the data by assigning meanings to visual elements, and then labeling it in a chosen language of communication: reducing events to charts and diagrams, and parameters to circles, squares, triangles and visual icons. A
processing which often results in distancing or increased complexity of interpretation.
It is proposed to elaborate in the presentation on the nature of self-generating data patterns through selected examples examined in Design education chose me (Interview-Prof Balaram)
My father’s name was Sinki Naidu. Naidu is a sub sect of farmers in Andhra Pradesh. Naidu's are usually land owner farmers. A few generations ago, during the terrible famine in Andhra Pradesh, my ancestor clan with one trusted washer man, came in search of livelihood to the northern tip of Andhra Pradesh seeking of land to till. At that time Bobbili was a princely state. They begged the maharaja of Bobbili for some cultivation work and slowly acquired a bit of land. When I was born in 1943 the village was so small having only 30 odd houses, mostly huts, no electricity, no school and no water. Toilets were unheard of. Women fetched water from a well a kilometer away. It was a tribal village. Railway track was nearby and small sugarcane factory belonging to Maharaja was the only technology.
My father always felt that I was miss-fit in our family because I had no interest at all in farming or in cattle. I avoided friends and preferred to be alone. I was in my own world wondering alone. I was interested in stories and singing, folk arts and domestic arts such as kolam. I was fascinated by any kind of pictures. It was a big joint family of around 14 people not including farm labor, the chicken, the goats and the calfs. We were so poor that my meal most of the time was just the rice water and raw chilli. A poor Brahmin from Bobbille used to cycle down to our village to teach us and earn from the government grant. My primary education was under him. Later with lot of difficulty, due to the insistence of my primary school teacher, I was admitted in the samsthanam high school in the small town of Bobbili which is 4km away from my small village. Bicycle was big luxury we could not indulge in. All through out my higher secondary education, I used to walk through the fields barefoot to the high school. We could not afford slippers. A