Happy 50th birthday to the Heritage Man!

AHMEDABAD: On Saturday when the country was celebrating the birth anniversary of the mysteriously disappeared Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Amdavad celebrated the 50th birthday of a man who struggled at an honorarium of Re 1 from Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC), to give it back its rich heritage. What could be a bigger gift for Debashish Nayak than this that the first meeting of the heritage conservation committee, to formulate laws for heritage conservation, happened on Saturday.
At 50, 15 of which were spent in Ahmedabad, Debashish has launched 25 heritage walks — in the country and abroad. A film made on Nayak showed how he broke the communism barrier in Kolkata to connect communities for heritage preservation and launched the Centre for Rehabilitation of Urban Traditional Architecture (CRUTA).
The Nayaks not only lived in the neighbourhood of Rabindranath Tagore's home in Kolkata, but celebrated events of history themselves. Debashish's younger sister Sharmishta was born on Gandhi Jayanti and he on Netaji's birthday, both of which he says were "not planned".
In 1991, when AMC was under an administrator, Debashish stopped by at Ahmedabad to visit a friend, Indu Capoor, on his way to Bhopal, where he was to replicate the heritage conservation experiment. Capoor is now his wife. He was carrying slides of the celebration of 300 years of Kolkata. The then administrator of AMC, an intense connoisseur of arts, PK Ghosh invited him over for a private slide-show on how communities alienated by communism were united again with a new sense of belongingness about heritage.
Debashish, an architect trained in urban conservation from Rome, repeated the Kolkata experiment in Ahmedabad, one high point being developers joining in to preserve heritage under the Ahmedabad Heritage Foundation (AHF).
In 1995 elections happened when Debashish was in the city. Ghosh, the then state urban secretary, suggested that municipal commissioner Keshav Varma take a look at his work. And Debashish became advisor to the newly launched AMC's heritage cell and the rest, as they say, is history.