Art641 - 'Hanuz Dilli Dur Ast' (Delhi is still far away), was a pivotal course during my MFA, led by esteemed Sohail Hashmi, whose unparalleled expertise in Delhi's heritage is well known. This first-semester course offered a profound introduction to Delhi’s multifaceted history and its many overlapping worlds. Through a series of guided walks, conversations, and on-site studies, the course explored the city through the lens of its seven Sultanates - its architectural remains, living neighbourhoods, ecological layers, and shifting cultural geographies. The fieldwork-driven curriculum, grounded in Hashmi’s deep historical knowledge and lived understanding of Delhi, fundamentally reshaped my perception of the built environment and the ways cities carry their pasts into the present.

Building on this foundation, Hanuz Dilli Dur Ast -“Delhi is still far away” - became both method and metaphor. It suggested that a city cannot be fully grasped at once; instead, it must be approached through fragments, atmospheres, textures, and the slow accumulation of embodied encounters. Every walk revealed the relationship between people, memory, infrastructure, and time - the ways cities grow, erode, adapt, and reorganise themselves through lived experience.

This project shifted my understanding of the built environment from static architecture to an active field of relationships.

It emphasised walking as research, observation as method, and the city itself as a primary text.

Moving through archaeological sites, ruins, mosques, stepwells, and dense urban trails made visible the negotiations between environment and everyday life - negotiations that continue to influence my approach to public space, scale, and spatial atmosphere in my artistic practice.

Continuing Influence

This project remains one of the earliest and most formative anchors for how I understand space.

It informs:

• How I read cities and their layered pasts,

• how I approach public-space projects,

• and how I trace the relationships between bodies, structures, environments, and cultural memory.

Hanuz Dilli Dur Ast stays relevant not as a past academic exercise, but as a continuing method—reminding me that every environment must be read slowly, through embodied attention, and never assumed to be fully known.