Our mark
A screen that filters, and a line redrawn each morning.
Two objects from Indian household and architectural practice. Neither is decoration — each describes something true about what the institute is trying to build.
The arch — jaali
Carved from one slab
A jaali is a perforated stone screen, found across Indian architecture in Rajput palaces, Mughal tombs and the mosques of Gujarat. It is carved from a single slab: nothing is added to make one, and the pattern that remains is what survived the cutting.
It works by filtering rather than blocking. Direct sun becomes diffuse light. Air forced through the small apertures accelerates and cools the room behind it — passive engineering, several centuries old. And it grants privacy without isolation: from inside you see out clearly, while from outside very little is visible in.
We took our mark from it because that is what we are trying to build. A boundary that still lets the world through. A place where women can see out, and speak, without being on display. And a shape — the arch, the doorway — for a passage rather than a decline.
The border — kolam
One line, never lifted
Every morning before sunrise, across southern India, women draw a design on the ground at the entrance to the house. A grid of dots is set down first; those are fixed. Then a single unbroken line finds its way around them, never crossing a dot, never lifting, never retracing, until it arrives back where it began.
It is made of rice flour, chosen so that ants and birds can eat it. By evening it is gone. The next morning it is drawn again.
We use it as a border rather than an emblem because that is what it is — something drawn on the threshold, beneath the doorway. And because it describes midlife precisely: by then the dots are largely set, and what remains is the route you take among them. A long path that returns to its own beginning. A practice renewed daily rather than a monument that stands still.
The programme is the same idea, taught.
Ten practices, one rhythm, renewed daily rather than achieved once.