D A.G. Krishna Menon DISCUSSION Sanjaya Baru: You mentioned the PPST. Now I've had some opportunitiesof interacting with the PPST and I'm familiar with some of their positions on technology, etc. One of their propositions is a consistent assertion of the difference between what they call western science and Indian science, that there is something called Indian science. I find it most difficult to accept this kind of premise, but that isn't the question. My question 47 is, if you accept this proposition, how would it affect your own understanding of architecture. Do you see architecture as Indian versus western — I don't only refer to designs and shapes, or even to materials — but do you actually see the two as alternative... Krishna Menon: I do see it as a strong alternative. I won't propagate it as the 'only' system, but it's certainly a useful alternative, and I do feel that for the survival of our environment we must have diversity. What is now happening is homogeneity. In Chanderi, for instance, ifs a very local system. They have four- and five-, sometimes seven-storey buildings there, all built of stone. When we studied these we realized that the buildings were made of standard components. Which is not that they piled stones upon stones to reach seven storeys; from the ground up each was made of standard components, i.e. a standard beam, a standard column, everything was produced elsewhere and built like a Meccano set. This was fourteenth-fifteenth century mechanized construction. It was never recognized to be one. Now we believe that the Russian system of industrialized housing, which does exactly this, is the only way of doing it. But in Chanderi it was achieved in its own way, using materials made by hand. So I'd say yes, this is an instance of industrialized housing developed purely indigenously. SB: Let me explain what I was getting at I'm not talking of Indian materials, or Indian design — I want to know whether there were Indian principles, thermodynamic principles... KM: But you've already introduced a bias, when you ask whether there was any equivalent to what the west developed. If you ask me whether there was any alternate view of reality, I'd say yes. We built in relationship to nature, for instance. Perhaps we didn't know any other way. When I studied the plan of Chanderi I realized that I as an architect wouldn't perhaps have planned it like that. But when one studies the water supply, etc., one realizes the beauty of the plan. There was no genius to it, but it does show a fantastic system. There is a different, perhaps, more humane, sense of reality. I have a lot of quarrels with the PPST myself, but then it brings me back to what I could call the Aristotelian point of view, as opposed to the Copemican. I'd say that we had Numbers 20 -21