It’s been a long time and a great deal has happened since my last post! Sorry about that, but I will try and make up for it by giving you a guided tour! Chalo. Let’s begin.
Guided tours keep us all very busy these days. We bring parents and grandparents to see the building where their children will be learning because we want them to feel as much a part of this as we are. We bring donors so they can see how much their contributions have achieved. We bring our friends and families and colleagues from other cities because we’re just so proud. And sometimes we just come by ourselves, to stand in front of this remarkable structure emerging from the ground like a waking dream . . . a reality we have to pinch ourselves to believe in.
Latika’s new campus will be our gift to the country – an iconic building purpose-built on universal design principles and meant to welcome and work for everyone. Nothing says that more clearly than our ramp.
A ramp can be functional, a way to access higher ground easily. A ramp can be magical, a secret pathway to a better world. Or a ramp can be both.
The Latika Ramp will be functional in the purest, most beautiful meaning of that word: a piece of architecture which will do exactly what it is supposed to, with that aha! click of pleasure that good design provides. Its sweet, gradual slope will encourage wheelchair users, stroller pushers and furniture shifters to visit every floor of our centre, exactly as an inclusive centre promises, even if the power fails and the lifts don’t work. And for once, disabled friends will not be discriminated against in the event of an emergency – wherever you are in the building, every floor has access to that ramp down which you can move at speed toward safety.
This ramp will have benches built into its ascent – places to rest, meet friends, read, listen to music, write, dream – and flowering vines (Latikas!) growing along its walls. Light will filter through its latticed brickwork while its roof protects users from rain and sun. Wide enough for two-way traffic and deep enough to protect adventurous climbing children.
And the breadth this structure requires to achieve its great height forms something truly magical: an immense, all-weather outdoor-indoor space for children to play, perform, create and become; for teens to conspire and plan and invent and for adults to chat, laugh, observe and admire. In this interior, we will have a theatre, a pottery corner, a basket-weaving workshop, a sandpit, a rockery, an artists’ studio and multiple free play spaces. We imagine it as a village piazza, a place to which the young and the old gravitate naturally, drawn by the sense of community, welcome and acceptance.
But the Latika Ramp will also inspire a way of thinking which goes beyond function, beyond form and into the realm of that waking dream we are walking in. A world where everything is open to everyone, where limits fall away and the word inclusion disappears too because now it’s just taken for granted, like the air we breathe. The Latika Ramp will be living proof of what we always say:
Plan for the most vulnerable
and the world works better for everyone.
Admittedly, The Ramp will be the single most expensive structure in our campus. But we think it’s a small price to pay to create something never seen before in India: a walkway to wonder, a pathway to dreams and a deliberate and mindful journey to the stars.
