Builders and building contractors give us orders for supply of truck-load of granite and marble and natural stone. The give us orders based on ‘samples’ that we show them. They approve the sample. By approval of sample, it means that the supplier has to supply the same quality in every slab of granite. What is quality?

What is quality? Is it uniformity?

Can a certain quantity of natural stone be represented through ‘a sample’? How can anyone in the world guarantee adherence of different slabs of granite to one ‘approved sample’?

Is ‘approved sample’ a perfect piece of granite or stone?

In natural stone and granite, you won’t be able to come any great understanding of quality. Because of its very nature it is impossible to standardize the quality beyond the physical dimensions of slabs or stone. No matter the sample, you are not going to get identical looking granite or stone.

Even if one assumes that slabs and pieces of stone can be sorted and grouped strictly based on certain parameters, the cost of sorting is prohibitive.

Based on the purchase order, when the material ordered reaches the site, the builders and building contractors and their employees at the site engage in ‘quality checking’. The understanding of ‘quality’ is at best vague, unspecified and unclear, but since there is an ‘approved sample’, these clients offer all kinds of reasons to ‘reject’ the material that’s delivered.

Costs of handling natural stone are so high that all such rejections crush the supplier financially.

We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behaviour and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.

Lawrence Durrell in “JUSTINE”

What response do those vitrified tiles generate?

What response does that interior design generate?

Do they even generate anything? Anything worthwhile?

The other day I was at PVR Acropolis to watch Tapsee Pannu starrer Thappad. While the movie felt great, PVR’s renovation felt classic and plastic at the same time. When you visit there you’ll notice. The space feels spacious, the floor feels all plastic (courtesy the famed vitrified tiles).

Somewhere in the initial pages of Gavin McCrea’s Mrs Engels, there’s this exchange between Jenny and Lizzie, I can’t forget to share.

In her book, there’s naught worse than a new house that looks new. She said so just now before we left. ‘So long as the thirst for novelty exists independently of all aesthetics considerations,’ she went, ‘the aim of Manchester and Sheffield and Birmingham will be to produce objects which shall always appear new. And, Lizzie, is there anything more depressing than that lustre of newness?’

The lustre of newness is depressing indeed on most occasions. And in the case of copy-paste vitrified tiles, plastic too.