I read 79 books this year (down from 96 last year 🙈 ). And while I love a “Top Ten” list as much as anyone, this year I am choosing just one.

“How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built” by Stewart Brand arrived, as the best books do, at just the right moment. We are in the final stages of a major construction project – creating India’s first truly accessible building in Dehradun – and realizing that building is one thing and maintenance is quite another.

Brand says this: “The only satisfaction maintenance people can get from their work is to do it well. The measure of success in their labors is that the result is invisible, unnoticed. Thanks to them, everything is the same as it ever was.

The romance of maintenance is that it has none. Its joys are quiet ones. There is a certain high calling in the steady tending to a ship, a garden, a building. One is participating in a deep, long life.” Taking good care of a building is like bringing up a child well. Nutritious meals, fresh air, vaccinations, regular visits to the dentist, seatbelts, reading out loud, noticing the good behaviour, ignoring the bad: it all adds up to a wonderful, happy child and no one notices how hard you worked to ensure it. So be it. Every child deserves that kind of care and every building should have that kind of loving maintenance.

At Latika, we’ve been caring for kids for 31 years. Now we’ve got a 57000 sq ft of a kid and we’re going to care for it with the same love & devotion we’ve given those children. They’re the ones who taught us that that’s how it works.

It’s all about maintenance, and “a deep, long life.”