♦ Meenal Baghel: It occurred to me while listening to Yo-Yo Ma at the concert last evening that architecture is rather like music. It’s about finding balance and harmony. Do you, as an engineer, then see your role primarily as someone who interprets the architect’s notes? 
Shirish Patel: That’s a very complicated question. In earlier times, building design and construction was a single discipline. Two hundred years ago, there were no architects and engineers. It was one profession. The person who designed the ancient temples, for example, was both architect and engineer. He understood not only aesthetics but also structure. He was a person who understood everything including construction. What happened with the advent of science was that the humanities split away. They couldn’t understand science at all. C P Snow had that famous lecture on the Two Cultures (Rede Lecture, 1959) suggesting the term intellectual was adopted by the humanities people, as if the scientists were not intellectuals. It was understood (in the Western culture) that an individual could be either a humanities person or a science person. He couldn’t possibly be both and that was a terrible mistake for the building profession, because we straddle both streams. This breakaway of architecture from engineering has been damaging to both professions. 

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♦ MB: It’s interesting you should say that because I was reading about how Navi Mumbai came to be, and it was almost like a gathering of like-minded people, who were also concerned about the city, that came together and said, ‘Let’s do something.’ Such a thing would be impossible in this day and age.
SP: This is what happened: When the municipality published its first Development Plan in 1964, it showed the map of Greater Bombay, coloured in blue for commercial, purple for industrial, yellow for residential, green for green space, etc. It was a detailed pattern across the whole Greater Bombay, which stopped dead at the boundary. When some of us professionals - Charles Correa and I - asked, what happens beyond the boundary, they said, ‘That’s not our problem. We are the Municipality of Greater Mumbai, and what happens beyond is immaterial.’ Charles then said, ‘How can it be immaterial? It affects the city tremendously.’ So, we published an article in Marg in 1965, suggesting that New Bombay be taken up as a planned development. Whether one liked it or not, the city was going to develop eastwards. We said if you make it a planned development, it would be better and it could be self-financing. We went around for the next five years peddling this plan to anyone who would listen. We called every bureaucrat, every politician we would get hold of, but there was no response. 

♦ MB: They were not interested or…?
SP: I think we were too young. They looked at us - we were in our 30s — and thought how could they take us seriously.

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