Manish Dwivedi, Architect

During my childhood, we had many such conversations. The only difference would be the object of discussion, a door, a wall, or even scraps of paper from the grocery. All of them adorned with beautiful pencil sketches. The culprit Manish would often just grin and not comment.

Didi (elder sister), could certainly draw; she had a very good drawing hand, but she mostly copied from magazines, calendars, books or even other paintings. Manish is different. Even as a kid, he used to come up with genuinely new ideas. I guess part of the creativity was motivated by Rajeev. Rajeev is, what I truly call an engineer. Even when he was a kid, he used to have a very curious and creative mind about all the objects in the house. If the knife was blunt, it must be because Rajeev was trying to cut wood using it, if you saw a really curious artifact in a corner, most likely he made it. Anyway, Rajeev is a subject for a totally different article.

Time passed and during one of the drawing classes in school, Mr. R. C. Rathore, our art instructor, was awestruck looking at some of Manish's sketches. In fact he was so much so taken, that he started coaching Manish privately. Manish ended up creating a lot of paintings and collages for him. Once, Mr. Rathore talked about taking Manish to an art competition and about him thinking of a career in drawing and painting. Dad refused and we thought that it was the end of Manish's art career, except for the occassional outburst from the artist in his notebook.

To cut a long story short, Manish was selected to attend the School of Architecture in Roorkee University (now IIT-Roorkee). It is one of the most prestigious school and has an intake of around 60 students in architecture every year.

Manish maintains a weblog.