Rohit’s most recent HOKIndia.com blog post is about welcoming team members from the St. Louis office. Stop by and say hello if you are in Mumbai (but call first, it’s only polite!).

When did you decide to become an architect?

Early on in high school. It seemed like everyone I knew was studying to become a doctor or an engineer and I wanted to do something different. Cities always excited me, so there was a link there.

How did you jump from designing buildings to designing cities?

In India, at the time I went to college, they had just begun to offer planning as a degree course. There was tight competition process and planning was mostly a second choice for students. This has all changed and developed since then but I was admitted to study architecture and after two years of working, I realized I really wanted to …

It’s not often (OK, ever) that we get to break news on this blog, but even before HOK Media Relations Guru Mike has enacted his carefully planned strategy to announce HOK’s latest India news to the world I’m sharing it here.

After a decade of working on dozens of major projects in India, HOK now has an actual physical presence inside the country. HOK India head Rohit Saxena, who last summer moved his family from Atlanta back to his native India to open this office, has just transitioned his workplace from his in-laws’ kitchen table to HOK’s very own space in the beautiful new Hiranandani Gardens Township in Powai. The office is about a 20-minute …

The other day Steve Ma posted about his team’s plan to help the Government of Maharashtra lead the redevelopment process of Dharavi — a vast “slum” in the heart of Mumbai – with a sustainable, respectful, planning-led approach.

Prasoon Kumar then sent us these images from his team’s site visit to Dharavi:

That’s Prasoon with Steve Townsend in the last image.

There’s more on the Dharavi Evolution site.

I’m glad Slumdog Millionaire got the recognition it deserves. I hope Dharavi does also. The Dharavi community, a vast “slum” in the heart of Mumbai, played host to some of the shooting for the movie. For those of you who don’t know it, Dharavi is a squalid, dynamic place of more than 1 million people, a city unto itself, and by no means the only slum in Mumbai, but certainly one of the largest (in the world for that matter).

Consider that one out of every six people in the world lives in similarly impoverished conditions. Entree into the slums is very easy: fewer property problems, patterns of village life are replicated, and business is done with similar …