Madhavi Desai starts the conversation by reminiscing the time she has lived and spent in Ahmedabad since she was born, except for the five years she spent in the US for her post-graduation and the additional two years she spent working.  While talking about her family background, she remembers observing her father’s medical practice and not feeling a similar passion for his work. Instead, she felt intrigued when she noticed an architecture student’s models and this led to her journey of joining an architecture school in 1967. After graduating from the standardized Gujarati-medium education model, she observed stark differences in the entrance examinations of college. She was among the six girls in her class and she fondly recollects her experiences, lecturers, and new concepts that she was exposed to over the six years at architecture school. She recalls her first international field trip to Kathmandu as well as her first internship, where she was trained under Ar. Jal Gobat in Mumbai in 1971. Bombay in the 1970s was quite different as compared to the milieu and society she was used to in Ahmedabad at the time. 

On stumbling onto her early subject of research, which eventually became a book, she describes how the experience of working with the Bohra community is something she cherished all her life. Subsequently, she expands on how their culture was reflected in architecture, with a focus on Ahmedabad, and her learnings from this research. Moving on to her journey to pursue higher studies in the US, she reveals that it was a turning point in her life, and goes into detail about the flexible curriculum, access to vast research resources and faculty, and such elements she became privy to. In 1976, she got married in Austin, which eventually marked a shift in her life experience and she notes how her comfortable job soon began to look less exciting. Thus began a journey that led to her and her husband’s decision of coming back to India, after which they had their two daughters. Once they started a joint practice together, she began to face the challenges of multitasking between being a mother and a practitioner.