A desk in a shared office
In 2000 I stopped taking the firm's briefs and started taking my own. The office was in Chirag Delhi, shared, which is a polite way of saying that the photocopier and the telephone were someone else's and the rent was everyone's.
The projects were still mostly in Aligarh. That is the part nobody tells you about going independent in a tier-two city: your first clients are the people who already knew you. Delhi was where I worked. Aligarh was where I was trusted.
What the Delhi work looked like
The early Delhi work was small. Small offices, small houses, the beginnings of the factory work that would define the next decade. A project in Delhi lasted months; the same scope in Aligarh ran for a year or more, because in Aligarh a building is a family event and in Delhi it is a line on a businessman's schedule.
I learned which city I was in by how the meetings went. In Delhi, a client could decide over one lunch. In Aligarh, the same decision took three sittings, two references and a family conference. Neither way is wrong. But you draw differently for a client who decides at lunch: the drawing has to answer questions he has not asked yet.
Money, in the years I did not understand it
I will write about this plainly once, here, and abstractly everywhere else: in those years I had no instinct for saving. Good months were spent as they arrived. The work was always there and the growth was always sideways, and I mistook being busy for moving.
The detour years taught me what no project did: that a practice is not a portfolio, it is a payment discipline that happens to produce drawings. I learned it late. I am writing it here early, for whoever finds this in ten years.
The Aligarh pull
Through all of the Chirag Delhi years, the Aligarh projects kept arriving and kept asking me to come back. A site in Aligarh needs its architect standing on it. I was already making the weekly run before it became the system I run today: the week in Aligarh, the weekend in Noida where the family lives.
The next move was north, to Naraina, and the Delhi work turned industrial. That decade is told in its own entry.
The practice as it runs now is described on the practice page.