SECOND LIFE
Fashionable interface
ANUJ KUMAR
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Raghavendra Rathore’s secret interests unplugged.
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Photo: K. Gopinathan
Wide-ranging interests: There’s more to life than just clothes.
“Fine tuning the gurgling sound of a twin carburettor engine, while controlling the mix of oxygen and octane entering the cylinder just before the spark ignites creating pressure to spin the engine around…it’s almost like mixing a perfect Bloody Mary!”
Would you believe that these words are from the country’s leading fashion designer?
Restoring cars
Raghavendra Rathore, known for his majestic designs and eclectic cuts, loves to restore automobiles in his spare time. He started early.
“I stripped up a 1947 MG TC and put it back neatly at the age of 15, under the supervision of my father. It made me understand that discipline is needed to achieve an objective and importantly to take pleasure in the journey to reach the goal; in other words to live every minute, a hundred percent.”
This interest led him to sketching products, the most notable being chocolates, but he talks about lamp posts on the neighbourhood street corner with equal zeal.
“The oldest technique of sketching known to mankind is called ‘croquet sketching’. This encourages doodling concepts and ideas from stage one to stage two and is a bit like playing a game of croquet. In my free time, I take it on to myself to find solutions to age-old ‘designs’ problems, in products, design concepts and other socially integrated design.
“Maintaining a diary of these sketches can be a great asset, as it is never clear, when and how one idea connects to the other,” explains Rathore.
Life designs
“Everything in life is an interface and every interface has a design to it, a nicely designed interface yields better response in a holistic sense. This applies to almost any field in life but I choose to find this analogy working best for the imaginable world of software and its design. Empowered by extraordinary, resourceful and well-designed software, our century has been compressed in terms of the word ‘evolution’. In the cyber frenzy of today, all it takes to gauge the depth of social intelligence of a particular culture is reflecting on the tools they use to carve their dreams.
“Therefore, by simply looking at the kind of software that is in use, a road map of society starts to emerge. In terms of design, I have come to believe that just as movies are a reflection of our interest levels on trends that we aspire to as a culture, software too shares the same credence and has the influence of a possible impact on understanding, the DNA of the future worlds. It is the intangible processing the tangible for human consumption.
“I find myself exploring this domain freely as occupation, geography or epoch; have no limitations, while exposing you to the vision of things to come.”
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