Career Option for the Youth

Today, when I think of the word career, I cannot stop myself from thinking about certain words, which have become closely associated with it, such as passion, talent, ambition, drive, future, short-term, market, compensation, growth and trend. A rapidly growing economy always demands that the people belonging to that economy keep up with it. As the purse strings of the common man loosen with constantly swelling incomes, the once-luxurious comforts become standard and man aims higher and faster to achieve that which was once less than a distant dream. Looking back at the professional possibilities in the last two decades will show us how much the meaning of ‘work’ has changed and what all incredible things it has come to include. In this era of personality and individuality, it is only fair to say that every individual who one, is conscious of their own self and two, has the wherewithal to afford it, wants a stamp of their individual person on everything they own. And that is why I think that the career option that I have tried to think of is relevant to today’s youth. It emerges from the desire of being oneself and from the demand of making oneself count as something memorable, something more than ordinary. Let’s have a look.

Career option – Concept Specialist for Indoor/Outdoor Events

Now, on the face of it, this may seem like a fancy term for an interior designer or worse, a wedding planner. I request you to look at the title carefully. When I say ‘Concept’, I do not mean ‘theme’. When I say ‘Event’, I do not mean weddings even though our Indian minds automatically make that association far too easily. When I say ‘Specialist’, I truly do not mean ‘planner’ because planning includes executing and my interpretation of this career option does not include that yet. Say you have just bought a house. It is a 3 BHK + Study + Terrace in an upcoming suburban area of a big city and now you have to furnish it from scratch.

Your first call will be to some friend who knows a friend whose wife is an interior designer and/or who owns a giant house themselves and had it all furnished in the most gaudy, loud and expensive fashion recently. So, you will not take a chance and want to fill up your adequately big house as soon as possible with the season’s best. Your next thought will be children’s room and you will want to log on to online shopping sites to buy the cutesy stuff in pastel colors and cartoon motifs without giving it one more thought. And one by one, your entire house will become cluttered and crowded with oddball pieces, random art, bad furnishing with upholstery that looks like hand-me-downs from 18^th Century England and your bathrooms will look like they should be ice-cream flavors. And think about the next time you want to host a party in your house. Shifting furniture and covering sofas aside, you will really have to put it a lot of thought and effort to transform your living space into something where people can chill in summertime and warm up over Christmas. And I don’t blame ya. That’s what everyone does!

Now, let me tell you what our Concept Specialist can do for you. His first job will be to assess your house in terms of space to use and space to leave. That would mean that from each room and each passage, he will carefully measure out the space you will absolutely need for the daily living. For example, all your furniture and appliances will count in this space and will be subtracted from the total area. He will then look at natural light sources, possible light sources and of course, areas where one can and cannot adjust extra seats (chairs, loungers, divans, duvet et cetera. Next, he will go through the room plan as you have kept it, say, such and such room for your kids, this for the master bedroom and that for the drawing, and note down the kind of space orientation, door and window sizes and cupboard placement ideal for respective rooms. Finally, he will look at stairs, banisters, balconies, bay windows, hallways and landings that otherwise go unnoticed and make note of their placement and positioning. He will then have to take a week or so to determine what he is looking at. Wait, his job hasn’t even begun yet.

You have hired the concept specialist to determine how easy or difficult it will be for your house to turn into an instant venue for a number of everyday events that a family might host. Birthdays, anniversaries, congratulatory parties, fancy luncheons, evening soirees, dinner parties, wedding receptions, baby showers and going away cocktails are all part of his plan for your house. Now, his job is to basically look at your home as a blank space even as you live there with your stuff. After carefully mapping each square foot of your home, he has given himself a ballpark figure of the area that will remain free and open after you move in and especially of the area that you can utilize in many ways when you host one of these events. Now let us see what he brings to us after a week.

I am going to talk about a house from my imagination so you can picture the changes with me and see how this professional will work his magic around a house. First, let us cover the largest room of the house, the hall. He notices that you have a two-side open hall with two large windows and an archway leading to the kitchen. That means, out of the length of the hall, you will definitely keep a big section for the dining table and the sofa set. He will suggest that instead of keeping so much furniture and closing the room up, put in a kitchen counter running along the length of the kitchen, put up high stools there, facing the kitchen windows and keep smaller appliances like the microwave, the mixer grinder and the coffee maker on the diagonal counter. That way, everyone sitting down for breakfast or lunch will not have to get up constantly to fetch things, the person cooking will not have to make too many rounds to serve and everyone will have a cozier, more talk-oriented environment during meals.

Next, let us look at one of the rooms. This is the smaller bedroom with one window and an attached bathroom. First of all, he will tell you to utilize the side walls around the walls of the bathroom for a walk-in closet space so that there are no imposing armoires and cupboards standing tall in the room. Next, by putting in a cushion-seater on the window bay, it will look like a larger room with more space to ‘hang out’, and the bed can then remain smaller and compact. Another seater along the foot of the bed covered in matching upholstery will serve as quick hiding space for stuff and will also serve as a foot rest, a seat, a backrest for floor seating et cetera. Finally, he notices that the door to this room is rather big, opens into the hall and has nothing obstructing its way from the hall to the window of the room. That means that during a party or a get together, seating can be arranged in such a way that it goes into that room, and the room itself can be utilized for staging a younger version of the same party, say with non-alcoholic drinks and snacks with cheese and chips. But this is just a sample of his work.

Then, the most important thing of the concept house is how to maintain the mood of the party without hiring a DJ. Speaking of India and its cultures, not only are there too many rituals but also so many genres of music and ways to play them. And so, hosting a Rakshabandhan lunch will be wildly different from a teenager’s birthday party. Our man of the hour will tell you the following:

1. Which speaker set to buy for your music system so that you can install speakers in every room, have a bass near the main console and have a travelling music effect throughout the house when required.
2. At what height to install the extra speakers and what to do with the wires, in case you don’t go for the wireless set.
3. Which design of speaker suits each room; wood for wood, metal for metal and so on.
4. How far the main seating should be from the music station to be loud enough but not jarring.
5. How to place loose pieces of furniture during events. For example, hydraulic stools, settee, lounge chairs et cetera so it does not look like you borrowed your neighbor’s furniture for the night.
6. How to utilize the eating space so that everyone is not part of the serving party. Also, how to best display the food near the ovens so all women don’t become waitresses for the night.
7. What to do with guests staying over. Mattresses and blankets are passé. You don’t want your house to look like a dharamshala dorm room every time you have people staying over. Also, you may not be prepared to receive crashers in case they have too much to drink. In such cases, he will suggest fold-out beds, roll-up beds, twin-couches that turn into beds, chairs that expand into beds, camping beds et cetera so that you can maintain the look of the house while secretly knowing that everything in the hall can turn into a bed!
8. What kind of decorations you can put up for individual events instead of recycling the same tinsel and balloons and diwali lights for every celebration. This may look like an easy one but think if you had to host a homecoming for your son returning from the UK and a baby shower for your daughter’s first, what you would do. You cannot use anything common and with special decorations for each event, you can make all the difference with that little special ornament or place setting.
9. Even little finishing touches, like bookshelf placement, mood lighting that turns into broad daylight, hanging of chandeliers so they don’t look like hand-me-downs from a pseudo-Victorian uncle, reflective glass placement et cetera will also be part of his wheelhouse and part of your real house.

Finally, after about a month of shopping with you, moving furniture with you, putting up columns, hiding wires and placing crockery and flatware out of sight and within reach and so many other things, his field work will be done and your house will look like the trendiest pub in the evenings and the homeliest den in the mornings. But his final straw is yet to be put it. He will, from what he has done and accomplished through this association, create a ‘lookbook’ for your house, including all the main events you have already talked about and prepared for, and give you hints and ideas about what your rooms have the possibilities for. He will make an index of where what is and where what should be in case of an ABC event. And that will be the stamp of your concept specialist.

In terms of remuneration, this should fall subjectively under a regular interior designer’s fee plus the footwork he does with you, the purchases and taxes. But if the trend takes up, I doubt it will remain affordable for all sections of society and may require alternate methods of getting help. One can also think of online suggestion sites for those who cannot afford to pay the entire fee for the in-person service. Of course, since this is a yet unheard of concept, there are no schools offering the course but once again, an interior design school should be able to incorporate such a learning easily. What a person wanting to become a Concept Specialist will need is an immense sense of utility and style but with the twist of compromise and arrangement. They should have a very good idea of what the market offers and should not do their study from foreign lifestyle magazine and then go on a wild goose chase looking for chaise lounges. They should also have a degree in technical design, interior furnishings, and/or basic knowledge about wiring, woodwork and electronics for him to be a complete concept specialist. And there you have it!

Karishma

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