An Architect Eats Samosa

ArchitectureLive! con nues with Alimenta ve Architecture –

The fi h in a series of ar cles by Architect-Poet-Calligrapher
H Masud Taj interfacing architecture with food via geometry.
An Architect Eats Samosa
architecture.live/an-architect-eats-samosa/

Illustration: author

It is the month of Ramzan, and I am about to break the fast. The iftar hosted by the
Muslim Students Association of Carleton University here in Ottawa, Canada, is a simple
offering of dates and a samosa followed by dinner. The dates are three in number,
following the 1445-year-old tradition of Muhammad ฀

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 CU MSA Iftar. Photo: author

With the number of dates complementing the edible triangle, I recalled my thirty-year-old
Number 3 poem, devoted to that form whose very name, tri-angle, suggests the number.

No. 3

In chaos

The first enclosure

Angels have fled leaving

A kind of order inside

System trisecting the universe

With within without

Science

Is now possible

In a tent with pegs

Refixed further away

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Each paradigm shifts

To increasing howling outside

The poem braided Thomas Kuhn (paradigm shifts), Karl Popper (a new theory does not
overthrow but subsumes the previous one) and Jacob Bronowski (the scientific bird’s eye
view keeps enlarging to reach the unattainable God’s eye-view). Number 3 was one of
nine poems in my long poem Anatomy of Numbers: a series from one to nine with as
many quatrains as the number it addressed. As the final minutes of the fast ticked away,
rather than recall those forty-five quatrains (factorial nine), I recalled instead the Samosa
riddle by the 13th-century polymath Amir Khusro, the Sufi poet, musician and scholar who
is buried next to his guru Shaykh Khwaja Nizamuddin Auliya in Delhi. The 800-year-old
riddle pairs two unlike statements that point to their resolution: Why wasn’t the samosa
eaten and the shoe worn? The answer, lost in translation, is based on the rebus of the
pun “talla” – meaning both “to fry” and “sole of footwear.”

Illustration: author

Amir Khusro, while pioneering the Samosa genre in India, is late in the game. 8th-century
polymath Ishaq al-Mawsili in Bagdad of the Abbasid Empire reputedly devoted a poem to
“sambusak,” as it was initially called. Five hundred years later, the traveller-friendly snack
would reach India via the trade route of Muslim Civilizations. 13th-century Amir Khusro
and 14th-century traveller Ibn Battuta, who was in the court of Muhammad bin Tuqhluq,
would continue to celebrate its meat filling. The 15th-century ruler of Malwa Sultanate
Book of Delicacies (Ni’matnāmah Nas ̣ir al-Dīn Shāhī) shows him being offered “sanbusa”
that is inscribed informally above his head. Mandu would subsequently fall to the
Mughals, who had their recipe of Samosas that they called qutab, which “the people of
Hindustan call sanbúsah”. Following the recipe detailed in the 16th-century Mughal

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chronicle, The Ain-i-Akbari, you would find Akbar’s preference unbearably salty for your
modern palate. To reach this plate, the crisp triangle with a soft core had journeyed a
millennium and a half across the world and a history almost as old as Islam.

Courtesy: British Library I.O. ISLAMIC 149 & Tasting History with MaxMiller

The samosa, like the triangle, is named after its form. The etymological dictionary
Nişanyan Sözlük states that “It is derived from the Persian and Middle Persian word sih ‫ﺳﻪ‬
or sē ‫“ ﺳﯽ‬three,” i.e. triangle (itself from Latin triangulum meaning “three-cornered”). And
that is where we probe the samosa’s triangular relationship to the primary Platonic solid:
tetrahedron. It is in the manner of their respective making as the net along which a
straight strip of paper folds into a tetrahedron, dough folds into a samosa, that bears
kinship involving four triangles:

Illustration: author

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The lasting love triangle in India has fillings ranging from peas for Jains who shun root
vegetables to the Bohri Keema Samosa for those who relish meat fillings like my friend
Architect Keki. The other equivalent carnivore architect that comes to mind is R.
Buckminster Fuller (or Bucky), who reasoned that with Earth’s 200 million square miles of
spherical surface constantly exposed to the sun with its “syntropic, biochemical capability
to photosynthetically convert stellar radiation falling on Earth into hydrocarbon vegetation
that is in turn converted as “food” into all manner of biological proliferatings…” That is
Bucky’s way of saying plants ate sunlight, animals ate plants, so eating animals offered
the maximum sunshine bang for the buck. So when Keki and the pioneering Conservation
Architect Kirti visited Canada, I took them past Moshe Safdie’s Habitat to see Bucky’s
geodesic dome, a hangover of the seminal Expo-67 in Montreal.

(left) Expo67: Reflecting pool photo by Allegra Fuller Snyder. (right) Architects Keki & Kirti. Photos:
author

Bucky had his samosa riddle:

How many triangles do you get if you add one triangle + one triangle?
Answer: Four triangles
1+1=4
If you answered, “2 triangles”, Bucky would disarm you with his smile (with the upper
central incisor charmingly missing), saying, as in Synergetics 108:

Two triangles can and frequently do associate with one another, and in so doing
they afford us with a synergetic demonstration of two prime events cooperating in
Universe. Triangles cannot be structured in planes. They are always positive or
negative helixes. You may say that we had no right to break the triangles open in
order to add them together, but the triangles were in fact never closed because no
line can ever come completely back into itself. Experiment shows that two lines
cannot be constructed through the same point at the same time. One line will be
superimposed on the other. Therefore, the triangle is a spiral a very flat spiral, but
open at the recycling point.

Or, as another quatrain from Anatomy of Numbers (this time in Poem No.8) states:

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Crossing lines either
Subway or flyover
Or one interrupts
To let the other pass
Seeing your eyes glaze over, Bucky’s smile would disappear, and his soft grey eyes
would fix on you through his thick glasses fixed to his geodesic head with a rubber band.
With utmost concentration and rapid-fire clipped speech, he would semi-bark to
elaborate:

By conventional arithmetic, one triangle plus one triangle equals two triangles. But
in association as left helix and right helix, they form a six-edged tetrahedron of four
triangular faces. This illustrates an interference of two events impinging at both
ends of their actions to give us something very fundamental: a tetrahedron, a
system, a division of the Universe into inside and outside. We get the two other
triangles from the rest of the Universe because we are not out of this world. This is
the complementation of the Universe that shows up repeatedly in the way
structures are made and in the way crystals grow. As separate actions, the two
actions and resultants were very unstable, but when associated as positive and
negative helixes, they complement one another as a stable structure.

In other words, if the triangle is a potential tetrahedron, then a samosa is a crypto

tetrahedron. This is how he would resolve the riddle:

Illustration: author (based on Synergetics 108.01)

The tetrahedron was crucial to Bucky. The 60-degree coordination of the unfolding
tetrahedron was the geometrical configuration that linked the physical world to the
metaphysical, which he termed IVM or Isotropic Vector Matrix. Thinking mediated the two
worlds, and thinking for Bucky had a geometric shape. Hence the subtitle of his magnum
opus, the 1467 pages Synergetics: Explorations into the Geometry of Thinking in two

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wrist-bursting volumes. In my student years in architecture, it served as a parallel
curriculum. Little wonder, in my beginning year, Milk Booth design, my proposal included
reviving tetra packs invented in the 1940s that are easier to handle and pour and require
less material to produce. They were made by sealing the milkbag at right angles for a
stable tetrahedron. To open them, you snipped any one of the four corners.

Illustration: author

In my intermediate year, the tetrapack’s 90-degree turn morphed into the staircase’s
tread, a tetrahedron made of a pair of steel mesh hyperbolic paraboloids supporting a
triangular glass tread. The stairway was in synch with the tetrahedral structure I had
designed for a Tetra Hotel.

Drawing: author

Imagine my delight in seeing the Hall of Nations, which was ten years old, when I visited
Delhi as a freshly minted architect from Bombay during the IX Asian Games.
Spaceframes worldwide were made of steel joints in the 1980s. But while India lacked
steel, it didn’t lack ingenuity. The Hall of Nations was the acme of Desi Jugaad (you can’t
get more nationalistic than that); India’s largest uninterrupted exhibition space was
improvised using hand-poured concrete cast on site. Or, as Buckminster Fuller reportedly
praised, “space-age building made with bullock cart technology,” The icon of structural
expressionism put India on the modernist map: Raj karenge Raj Rewal aur Mahendra
Raj.

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 (left) Hall of Nations. Photo: Raj Rewal; (right) Interior View. Source: “The Structure – Works of
Mahendra Raj”

The Asian Games motto was Fraternity Friendship Forever. Alas, such sporting spirit was
nowhere in evidence thirty-five years later when the Hall of Nations succumbed to the
mean-spirited philistines of Bulldozer Raj that bulldozed the Raj & Raj icon, leaving the
alphabetical soup of impotent heritage bureaucrats of INTACH, ASI, and HCC wringing
their hands. While a historical icon cannot shackle us from upgrading our infrastructure,
neither should history be left shackled with a wannabe icon.

While the tetrahedron was virtually Bucky’s patent approach to solving structure, his
protégé Ann Tyng became Louis Kahn’s lover, resulting in the uncharacteristic-of-Lou
unbuilt-City-Tower. Bucky was the epitome of lightweight structures, and Lou was all
gravitas. It was in the tetrahedral three-dimensional lattice of his Yale Gallery ceiling cast
in concrete that Lou made the tetrahedron his own. He was the connoisseur of
compression, while Bucky was the tension virtuoso. They were as unlike in their
approaches as the crisp exterior of the samosa was to its soft filling. And yet it was in the
cognitive dissonance of the two, like the counterpoint in music, that resulted in Bucky
speaking at Lou’s funeral.

Yale University Art Gallery Ceiling Photo: Samuel Ludwig & Louis I. Kahn+Anne Tyng unbuiltarch 2021

Louis Kahn would visit India at the invitation of Architect Doshi, who would also invite
Bucky to Ahmedabad. I am sure Doshi would have served Bucky Samosas, albeit
Veggies, where the pastry is thinner and crispier rather than thick and flakey, and it is

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more of a flattened cone in its folding than a pressed tetrahedron. Bucky’s itinerary was
astutely choreographed by Doshi to transit via Bombay without stopping there, perhaps
because Bombay was the domain of Charles Correa, the true inheritor of Bucky’s
inventive approach, having studied under him both as an undergraduate at the University
of Michigan and as a graduate student at MIT. Before Ahmedabad, Bucky was lecturing in
New Delhi, where, in 1958, he delivered three talks on a single day. At each talk, he
noticed a young woman in the first row. So, he presented her with a tensegrity sphere
model, and she invited him home to meet her father, Nehru. Their meeting lasted over an
hour, filled with Bucky’s rapid-fire monologue and the prime minister’s silence. That was
the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Eleven years later, Indira Gandhi invited Bucky to
deliver the Nehru Memorial Lecture in her inaugural year as Prime Minister.

Buckminster Fuller with Indira Gandhi (Architectural Forum Jan–Feb 1972) & with B.V. Doshi (1977)

In his “Ten Proposals for Improving the World,” Bucky puts an Indian spin on his ‘design
science revolution’ :

The intellect, vision and courage of Mahatma Gandhi conceived of passive

resistance with which bloodless revolution he broke the hold on India of history’s
most powerful sovereignty. [But … ] passive resistance will not amplify the
production of life support. In extension of the Mahatma’s magnificent vision, we are
committed to the design science revolution by which it is possible bloodlessly to
raise the standard of living of all humanity to a higher level of physical and
metaphysical satisfaction than hitherto experienced or dreamed of by any humans.

This was vintage Bucky. It may have won over Indira Gandhi (his bio lists him as “Chief
Architect, Completion of the Design for the International Airports at New Delhi, Bombay,
and Madras” in 1973) but would not have convinced the Mahatama. But Gandhi would
have yielded to his conjunction of “physical and metaphysical.” Just as in the Samosa, the
crispness of the shell and the softness of contents coexist, so do Synergetics’s physical
and metaphysical interface. It was why, when shown the Sri Yantra, Bucky exclaimed,
“That’s an isotropic vector matrix,” (IVM) that lay at the heart of Synergetics as “an array
of equilateral triangles which is seen as the comprehensive coordination frame of
reference of nature’s most economical, most comfortable structural interrelationships

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employing 60-degree association and disassociation.” (Synergetics 420.02). Like his
great aunt Margaret Fuller, Bucky was a transcendentalist, and the IVM was nature’s
coordinate system for him.

Illustration: author (IVM based on 12degreesoffreedom.org)

At the centre of Sri Yantra was the bindu unmanifest, giving rise to the first move of the
manifest: the innermost enclosing triangle. It is the original love triangle of Rishi, Devata,
and Chanda, or the observer (1) observing (2) the observed (3). The succeeding layers of
Sri Yantra encompass the manifestation of the universe.

This is the role of symbols: to connect the microcosm to the macrocosm, the inner reality
within each of us, to the outer reality that surrounds all of us. Or, as Bucky used to say,
“Unity is plural and at minimum two.” i.e. the samosa is both the crispness of the shell and
the yielding of the centre; without the metaphysical centre, the physical is hollow, and
without the physical, the metaphysical is unmoored. The ancient Sri Yantra and Bucky’s
IVM unfold in tandem from the meditative centre to the far reaches of a cosmos whose
centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere in sight.

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 “Intuition – A Metaphysical Mosaic”
by R. Buckminster Fuller.

Life’s original event

and the game of life’s
order of play
are involuntarily initiated
and inherently subject to modification
by the a priori mystery
within which consciousness first formulates
and from which enveloping and permeating mystery
consciousness never completely separates,
but which it often ignores
then forgets altogether
or deliberately disdains.

The connection between consciousness and cosmos, between earth and sky, is
embodied in rituals like fasting during Ramzan. The azaan is an aural manifestation of
that yearning, as is the form of the minaret, the physical quest to express the
inexpressible metaphysical, as Hassan Fathy pointed out. We were standing on the
terrace of his house and looking at the dark silhouette of the Sultan Hasan Madarssa
Minaret – the tallest in medieval Cairo. “See how the minaret accelerates your vision
upwards. It is divided into sections that rhythmically shorten the higher you go, like an
accelerando in music. And the sections keep getting narrower, and their shapes change
— from square to octagonal to cylindrical, adding to the acceleration.” Furthermore,
classical minarets with three balconies express a spiritual ascent via stations of Islam
(submission), Iman (faith), and Ihsan (righteousness), with the plan changing from the
square of the earth via the intermediate octagon to the circle of heavens, even as the
openings increase as you ascend in the growing light.

The azaan worldwide is based on the Middle Eastern maqam melodic system, which
creates a mood that varies with the time of day. At Maghrib sunset, it is the maqam
Segah, with its short duration comprised of its scales’ rise and fall. While the samosa
tempts us, we reach first for a date to commemorate the tradition of Muhammad ฀
breaking fast with three dates.

Even before the azaan ends, we are feasting on samosas. As Dunyahaigol suggests,
Sath khane se samosa, badh jaatha hai bharosa: Eating Samosas together increases
trust in each other.

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 Illustration: author

Author’s Note: Anatomy of Numbers was first recited at the artist Anjana Mehra’s “Urban
Seasons” Vernissage in 1995 at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai
and recently published as a calligraphic long poem in Sikandarah: Calligraphy, Epigraphy,
Geometry, Islimi, Poetry, Photography (Y D Pitkar, Richa Raut & H Masud Taj. New Delhi:
Copal Publishing 2024). An account of Bucky’s meeting with Indra Gandhi and Nehru is
given by Alden Hatch in Buckminster Fuller -At Horne in the Universe (NY: Crown 1974,
pp. 214-15); Bucky’s free verse Intuition: a Metaphysical Mosaic is in Ekistics 30:179 p.
256-260. “Ten Proposals for Improving the World,” is the final chapter of Earth Inc 1973
p.173-180. Scott Eastham showed Bucky the Sri Yantra and elicited his correlation with
the IVM in American Dreamer (2007). The PDF of several illustrations and calligrams in
this essay can be freely downloaded from the author’s Academia: Calligraphy.

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