Having done that, Pierre Jeanneret paid the needy from his bank account. UE Chowdhury explained that due to the non-disbursal of salaries, the staff members are tense and cannot concentrate on their work properly.Īfter knowing the whole story, Pierre Jeanneret asked UE Chowdhury to talk to staff members and prepare a list of essential and bare minimum money requirements. Jeanneret asked her if there was any resentment in the staff. He called UE Chowdhury – the only lady architect in the department who could understand and speak French, English, Hindi, and many other languages.
The staff was only Punjabi or Hindi-speaking, and most were not fluent in English.Īfter a few days, Pierre Jeanneret smelt the rat and felt everything was not going smoothly in the office. Nobody told Pierre Jeanneret directly, mainly due to the language barrier as he was a French-speaking person and not quite fluent in English, what to talk of other local languages like Hindi and Punjabi. Resultantly, the entire staff faced tough times meeting their ends.ĭue to this challenging situation, there was lots of whispering amongst the staff under tremendous financial pressure. The reason was the delay in passing the annual budget by the state government and some other procedural delays. There came a time when the disbursements of salaries of the staff were stopped for one or two months. There is an exciting yet touching anecdote. Apart from this, he was an outstanding architect with exceptional qualities like creativity, inquisitiveness, adaptability to new environments, skills to handle different building materials and understanding of the users’ requirements.ĭuring his one-and-a-half decade-old stint as head of the Department of Architecture, Pierre Jeanneret was loved and respected by his junior colleagues for his affectionate and caring attitude. I have learnt about Pierre Jeanneret from my senior colleagues that he was straightforward, humble, polite, down-to-earth, amicable, and caring. I started recollecting and writing some anecdotes to complete the new assignment, my younger friend gave me.
Partap singh kairon relationship with nehru professional#
Since the beginning of my professional career, I have listened to numerous tales about Pierre Jeanneret, who remained the Chief Architect of the Department of Architecture from 1952 to 1965. Jawahar Lal Nehru Pierre Jeanneret with his Indian colleagues I never met Pierre Jeanneret, but I have long been associated with many of his Indian colleagues who have worked directly with him. The reason was an age difference, as I was only ten years old when Pierre Jeanneret left this world in 1967. I found the suggested topic very interesting but doubted whether I could do justice to it. He intended to know something more and different about Pierre Jeanneret, his personality and relationship with his staff and his ways of tackling senior functionaries of the government. Luckily, I worked with many of the associates of Pierre Jeanneret, like UE Chowdhury, Jeet Malhotra, HS Chopra, and others.Ī Nepal-born American architect asked me to pen some untold anecdotes and stories of Pierre Jeanneret. I joined the Department of Architecture, Punjab (once headed by Pierre Jeanneret) in 1980 and served there for more than three decades.
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