Sheila Sri Prakash starts the conversation by reminiscing her experiences growing up under the doting eye of her mother and her father, who was an army official. She started training in Bharatanatyam at a very young age and practiced rigorously. She fondly remembers how she had to be enticed with chocolates to begin training. Her dance training later evolved as a more meditative practice where she could freely imagine elements in a play-act. Growing up surrounded by nature, she went on to adopt close to seventeen indie dogs in her adulthood. Her value system was rigidly put in place by her family and she always knew to keep in mind those less fortunate than her. She also grew up unbeknownst of any gender biases that most young girls grow up with and landed a seat in an architecture school only realizing later, the effects of being the minority gender in class. 

She soon married a senior from her university in 1974, at the age of eighteen. She worked for two years under an engineer but later moved on to places that allowed her to focus more on design while juggling between her new role as a mother and architect. She began her private practice in 1979, after many events that she believes happened by chance, setting an important precedent for women practitioners in the field. She built a separate studio and spent many hours in her green space sketching so still that she once spotted a snake calmly visiting and leaving. Taking up several significant projects along the way, she particularly recalls having worked with many proud local craftsmen in the past, who took up meticulous detailing unseen in today’s designs. Despite the rigorous conditions and travel, she challenged conservative notions of her as a ‘woman architect’ so much as to go to the extent of taking responsibility for tasks her male counterparts shied away from. Through her efforts, she went on to build a niche market for herself.