SHIV DATT SHARMA - Life and Work is intended and written as a Reference Book. With rapid drop in the numbers of those who once upon a time read non-fiction for widening the horizons of their minds with progressively deepening understanding of human purpose, concerns, and creativity, hordes of Coffee-Table Books have been flooding the modern market sustained by strategic lobbying and clever hype. These publications regardless of their authors' credentials have one thing in common: They all carry glossy pictures and flashy opinions that border on the frivolous but promise good reading as cheap amusement for sure-shot time-killing. They thus leave their readers no wiser than they were when they first displayed awesome courage to buy them and later ventured to read them with exemplary patience.
This work as a Reference Book on a serious subject like architecture is an attempt at breaking the stated stereotype in order to offer something that should interest the prospective readers besides stimulating their psycho-spiritual appetite for ingesting new food for thought into their cerebral system. The scheme followed in the book draws upon Le Corbusier's classification of City-Functions - Living, Working, Care of Body & Spirit, and Circulation - besides the categorisation of Shiv Datt Sharma's oeuvre into three phases in which his professional career developed steadily honing his skills of architectural creativity as he applied it to diverse building-types.
The resulting mix-up of two approaches should provide the readers with essential setting to familiarise themselves with the architect's professional growth thereby enabling them to see for themselves if it is commensurate with the value of author's findings concerning it.
Dr SS Bhatti [80] is India's most versatile professional-architect; artist; art, architecture & literature critic; poet; singer; musicologist; writer; philosopher; and mystic. He applies the tools of Theory, Practice, Research, and Pedagogy to the study of four major fields of human endeavour: the Humanities, Art, Science, and Technology. He hails from a family of artists, architects, artisans, and builders. His ancestors built the Badshahi Masjid [Royal Mosque] in Lahore during Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's reign. His father Sardar Balwant Singh Bhatti became the first medical artist when he joined Glancy Medical School, Amritsar, in 1941, and eventually set up the Museum for the Department of Anatomy. Dr Bhatti holds 'Human Creativity' to be a divine endowment to all peoples inhabiting the globe. He insists that Science belonging to the 'secular' quartet as noted above is not at all opposed to Spirituality which is the staple diet of Religion. Both are perfectly valid modes of apprehending the Objective [Outer World of Nature] and the Subjective [Inner World of Mind] Realities. Only their means and methods are different.
