1995
I took the bus from Aligarh to Delhi in 1995 with my certificates and the habit of drawing. Aligarh is my hometown, and it is where almost all of my work would eventually live, but the craft started in Delhi, in other people's offices, on other people's buildings.
I lived first with my maternal uncle. That detail decides how you work more than any curriculum does. When you live at someone's goodwill, you come home late, you keep the lights low, and you take the work that is offered instead of the work you would have chosen. I did jobs in architecture firms for two years and I drew everything they put in front of me.
What the firms taught
What the firms gave me was not style. It was tolerance for the boring parts. Dimension strings that close. Door schedules that match the plan. Sections that a contractor can build from without calling anyone. I did not know it then, but this is the whole profession. The drawing that cannot be misread is the entire value.
In 1996 I got married, and the family moved into a rented house. The arithmetic of a household makes a draftsman into a businessman whether he plans to be one or not.
The first freelance work
The freelance work arrived through people, the way it would for the next thirty years. The Mayor of Aligarh. The owner of Factory Link Locks. Reputed names, and both of them willing to trust a young draftsman because someone they knew had seen the drawings. There was no marketing budget then and there has never been one. Clients showed my drawings to other clients. That is the entire system, and it began with those two projects.
By 2000 the freelance work was the work, and I stopped going to the firms. That is the line I count from: self-employed in 2000, in a shared office in Chirag Delhi, with most of my projects still in Aligarh.
What I would tell the man on the bus
Nothing about the craft. He learns that from the firms.
I would tell him the thing that took longest to learn: the drawing is a promise with a schedule attached. The clients who paid the advance early were the ones who let me keep that promise well. The ones who wanted the drawings first and the payment later taught me why the advance exists. Both lessons cost something. Only one of them taught me anything I could use again.
The journey from that bus seat runs on through Chirag Delhi, then Naraina, then back to Aligarh for good. I intend to write all of it down here, in order.
Read next: Chirag Delhi, 2000, the shared office where the self-employed years began. The practice today is described on the practice page.