I would describe my journey as multi-lateral one. With time, I embraced new roles and each one of it came with new challenges and was an addendum to my personality. Today, I can describe myself as an architect, a mother, a wife, an entrepreneur and even more.

I belong to a family with Defense background. As people, my parents are slightly conservative and disciplined in the lifestyle but extremely liberating in terms of choices. Be it career, business or life partner — my family has been extremely supportive and accepting of the choices I have made in life.

 

Architecture just happened to me; I didn’t grow up thinking I would be an architect. I was always creative and did not want a stereotypical education. The reason I got interested in architecture is that I saw it as a field of synthesis — basically a field where you bring into play different aspects of various fields, i.e art, history, culture, climate and technology. Unlike traditional colleges where you must slog yourself in class rooms and libraries, reading and writing all the time, a course in architecture gives you the liberty to use the right side of your brain, the creative part.

After education, entrepreneurship was the first addendum to my personality. It was rather slow in the beginning, but every single work was extremely exciting. I started off back in 2005, with renovating a small garment store in Meerut, to be executed at a fast pace. At the same time, I bagged my second project which was a branch of kids wearstore at the lower floor in the same building. Later, in the same year, I got my first break when the owner of the store approached us to build his residence. The journey that began with a small retail project transformed into large houses. A lot of it was because of our strong work ethics and a personal relation that we develop with our clients.

From then to now, everywhere I go, I see the world through the lens of design. Just try to go out to a restaurant with architects, without them commenting on the lighting, or acoustics of the space, or the traffic flow from the kitchen. There are lessons everywhere, and there’s inspiration everywhere. You don’t stop designing when you go out for dinner or when you go to a museum or walk down the street. It’s very much a 24/7 way of thinking.

As business grew, architecture’s deadline-driven culture made it difficult to balance raising a family with the expected long work hours.Motherhood challenged my professional journey. It becomes a juggling act-work commitment and family responsibilities. Initially it was quite taxing to achieve the right balance between working hours while raising newborns. 

My husband is my greatest support. Back in 2012, when we had our first kid, he came up with the idea of having a kid’s nursery in office. So, instead of stepping back in my career, he helped me balance both together. Having my kids around in office actually made me concentrate better at work. I was stress-free and knew I could monitor them anytime.

And, also in this process, I learned to ask for help. As women, we are inherently trained not to ask for help or accommodation; it’s seen as an expression of weakness that you can’t do it all alone. Having children forced me to re-align my priorities. Sometimes, we tend to think we can do it all. We don’t want to acknowledge early enough that we can’t do it — if your kid is sick, you have no choice but to deal with it. It takes a lot of maturity to admit when it’s not working, and to ask for what you need. Hence, delegating out work and a building a supportive team made delivery of work less stressful and more effective.

From entrepreneurship to leadership, my roles were further refined. As a business owner, it is important for me to be fair to everyone. I always assume that men and women can and should do the same work. Women designers in our studio are given equal opportunities to go on site and deal with on-site technical situations. No one in our design studio gets preferential treatment. We, as an institution, believe in having strong focus to deliver quality design work, not just on our own but also empowering team to deliver the same.

Presently, we are working to make 42mm Architecture a more diverse and complex company, capable of handling highly specialised design projects and collaborating with specialised professionals for delivering extremely complex and unique projects. At the same time, we also look at revelling in the intricacies, intimacies and stumbling blocks of our family life.