Chapter 4 — The Treasure Within

Hafeez Contractor is one of India's leading architects. Born in 1950, he earned his Graduate Diploma in Architecture from Mumbai in 1975 and later graduated from Columbia University, New York, on a Tata Scholarship. He began as an apprentice under T. Khareghat and became associate partner in 1977. His firm, which started in 1982 with two staff members, had grown to over 350 employees at the time of the interview, with projects spanning bungalows, hospitals, hotels, airports, and townships.

Contractor was a good student only in Classes 1 and 2. From Class 3 he lost all interest in studies. He was passionate about games, pranks, and leading a gang. He copied in exams, tried to obtain question papers beforehand, received canings almost every week, and barely opened his textbooks — classmates booked his books for the next year because they were almost brand new.

He had continuous nightmares about sitting for a maths examination and knowing nothing. These nightmares persisted for many years and only faded four to five years before the interview.

When Contractor was approaching Class 11, the Principal called him and spoke to him for five minutes. He told him he had been a good student who never studied, that the Principal had protected him until then but could no longer do so, that his mother had worked hard and paid all his fees while he only played games, and that it was now time for him to rise to the occasion and study.

He stopped playing sports completely that year — he did not step onto the field at all. He went for prayers and spent his time only eating and studying. He gave up copying and studied on his own, eventually scoring 50% (second class) in his SSC exam. His Principal considered this a distinction given where Contractor had started.

It happened by chance. After his mother stopped him from joining the army (his aunt tore up the admission letter) and dissuaded him from the police force, he enrolled at Jaihind College in Bombay. His German teacher died, and rather than change colleges he returned to French, learning from a cousin whose husband was an architect. Visiting that office, he spotted an error in a window detail drawing, won a bet over it, designed a house when asked, and was advised to join architecture. He passed the entrance exam with an A+, despite the college normally requiring 80–85% for admission.

Mrs Gupta was his teacher in Class 2 or 3. She noticed his sketches and told him, 'You are useless in everything else but your sketches are good. When you grow up you become an architect.' Contractor did not understand at the time but she was right. After becoming an architect, he went back to meet her and tell her so.

Discipline in the boarding school required a full, neat uniform at all times, so a missing button was a serious problem. When students lost buttons while playing or fighting, they came to Contractor, who would cut a button for them from chalk using a blade.

Contractor says that putting design, construction, psychology, and sociology together and making a sketch from all that is 'mathematics'. He started by hating maths as a subject and arrived at his own interpretation of it through his work as an architect — what he calls coming full circle.

He says he was very bad at languages and very bad at maths. Science and geography he could deal with. His broader problem was that he studied without application of mind — whatever was taught today he would forget after two days, and he was not interested in the curriculum at all.

The interview was conducted by Ms Bela Raja, editor of Sparsh, a newsletter from the Resource Centre at The Valley School, Bangalore.

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