Mumbai: S
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Sahyadri 2
2017-18: Murals
750 volunteers and artists got together to paint eye-catching murals on the walls of drab shanties
There is something wrong with the parrot drawn on a black wall in this uneven Ghatkopar slum. Its neck is missing and it seems to be inspecting its own back at an odd angle. The parrot, it turns out, used to be an owl. An artist had drawn the nocturnal bird first but then the rustic residents of Sahyadri 2 — one of the many slums perched like Lego blocks on this Asalpha hillock — decided that they didn’t want to wake up to “a bad omen”. So, his chalk hastily replaced the hawklike beak with a pouty, curved bill.
From the Mumbai Metro, however, you won’t be able to see this mutant bird. Nor the mural of a cat sitting inside a soapy bubble — inspired by a resident’s kitten — or the painting of a palm holding a turtle whose blueprint, Hari, lives nearby. All you can see from the air-conditioned train is a loud, multi-coloured installation of shanties that is likely to make filmmaker Rohit Shetty go: “Next song location.”
Last month, Dedeepya Reddy’s nonprofit initiative ‘Chal Rang De’ tied up with the Metro and paint manufacturer Snowcem Paints to give the drab vertical slum a postcard-like makeover reminiscent of Italy’s vibrant Positano village. As a Metro traveller, the artist in her would cringe at the morose sight of the grey hilltop houses. An eye-popping paint job could change the perception of Mumbai’s slums, decided Reddy, cofounder of creative agency Fruitbowl Digital.
After getting residents on board — “I even showed them Photoshopped ‘after’ renditions of the slum,” she says — Reddy got her team to create a website and found several hundred volunteers, including senior citizens, online who finished painting 175 walls in two weekends. The muralists came later. Reddy’s brief to them was: “Reflect the life of Asalpha’s locals or relate to them”. So, besides its many women home entrepreneurs and cats, you will also find an astronaut dangling from a planet on a wall here - -a reminder to local kids to dream big. “Many of my schoolfriends have come over after the paint job,” says seventh grader Siddhesh Jadhav of nearby Shivneri Vidya Mandir school who chipped in by painting three walls.
Doused in 400 litres of sponsored paint by around 750 people, the slum is now not only distracting Metro users but also seeing foreigners with SLR cameras ascend its stone stairs. Just ten days ago, a buzzing noise that sounded “like a giant fly”, made an elderly resident Krishnamma step outside her tiled 10ft-by-10ft home. Above, three drones circled her freshly coated neighbourhood. “Flying cameras with red and blue lights,” recalls Krishnamma as she engages in a mockbroom fight with her three-year-old neighbour Dev — one of the many happy, photogenic kids etched in the murals.
The day-long painting exercise stripped Reddy and her team, who had never stepped into a slum before, of their own grim stereotypes. Spontaneous lunch invitations from residents gave them a peek into the obsessive cleanliness of the one-room home dwellers. “They are now like family to us,” says Reddy, who bit into pooran poli at the one-room home of the affable Surekha Gade, a housewife whose son’s wedding invitation card bore the names of their deceased cats, ‘Lalu’ and ‘Prasad’. Reddy now calls her “billiwali aunty”.
Along with hospitality, though, came servings of mild hostility. One resident who had a protective black sheet on his outer wall refused to let it be painted at first but relented on seeing how good the neighbour’s wall looked. Last-minute compromises with colour palettes had to be made. “Some residents didn’t want the colour green,” recalls Reddy, who treasures such insights into India’s prejudices as “learnings”. Some requests for tweaks, though, were rooted in reason. Freelance IT entrepreneur Vinayak Gade (27) says his family asked for the wall near the passageway outside his home to be changed from dull greyishblue to a sunny yellow so it would reflect the light from the sole overhead tubelight onto the stairs better. Such changes didn’t really interfere with the view. Pan out and Asalpha now looks a lot like Positano. Baffled vegetable vendors who sit beyond videogame parlours and kirana stores here now find themselves directing tourists towards “colour”.
Next on Reddy’s radar is a Bandra slum known as Tabela. Team member Sumitro Sircar says they are also toying with the idea of revamping hospitals, jails and railway stations through artwork. Meanwhile, at Asalpha, the exteriors are becoming as clean as the interiors. ‘Billiwali aunty’ Surekha Gade has stopped mopping the floor outside her corner home for a month now. “Earlier, men used to routinely spit paan outside our door on their way up or down,” says Gade, who had grown tired of chastising them. “Now, they’ve stopped spitting because of the paint,” smiles Gade.
Strand Book Stall
When getting Strand-ed in Mumbai was a delight, February 22, 2018: The Times of India
From: When getting Strand-ed in Mumbai was a delight, February 22, 2018: The Times of India
After 70 Years, Iconic Bookstore In City’s Fort Area To Pull Its Shutters Down On February 27, 2018
Long years before books were marketed like artisanal soap and litfests became as commonplace as fashionweek, a little shop in Mumbai’s Fort district had figured out how to hook the reader. Strand Book Stall managed to attract booklovers from not just the city, but across the country. And it didn’t even have a coffee shop.
Strand finally pulls its shutters down on February 27 after 70 years. But in many ways, the shop had started dying nine years ago when its passionate proprietor, the twinkle-eyed T N Shanbhag, passed away and with him the famous line, “Hardbound book at paperback prices…” Whether or not it was a great book — for Shanbhag was known to have a way with dispensing remainder stock from international publishers — the buyer instantly felt compelled to buy it.
Indeed, that winning combination of passion and discount had made Strand a must-do stop for any reader, almost as if by being in there one osmotically became a person of letters. In the days of black and white newsprint, the senior editors of The Times of India would go to Strand after lunch, browse and catch up with Shanbhag, and then stroll back through the arched arcades of DN Road as part of their daily constitutional. Shanbhag used to say about a former Times editor, “Sham Lal’s wife hated me because he spent all his time and money on books.”
Over the years, Strand had footfalls from India’s top journalists, thinkers and writers, many of whom found their reading lists here which went on to shape their work and lives. “I’ve seen Dr Manmohan Singh, when he was RBI governor, come and sit there, have a cup of coffee and select 50-100 books,” said historian Deepak Rao.
Writer Kiran Nagarkar has known about the bookstall since it was in the premises of Colaba’s Strand Cinema. Started in 1948, it shifted location in the 1950s. “By the time I’d finished my schooling, he (Shanbhag) had found his place near PM Road. That’s where I first came across the biographies of Hô Chí Minh and Fidel Castro. It was at Strand that I discovered for the first time there’s no country in the world that has played havoc with the democracies of nations like the US. I came to know about authors and books I would have never have known through Strand – Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte or The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness,” Nagarkar said.
Delhi-based publisher and novelist David Davidar recalled, “When I was in my early 20s I lived and worked in Bombay and was a frequent visitor to Strand where Mr Shanbhag would give impoverished journalists such as myself abundant credit to buy the books we craved.”
Some former employees said that within a few months after Shanbhag’s passing, they were advised to stop offering the famous discount. Some felt let down by his successors and left the charming musty haven with heavy hearts to work in other bookstores, attempting the same discount-with-asmile, while countering the onslaught of the online selling monster. One long-time ex-employee wistfully said, “Strand was a brand; it could easily have been sustained.”
While over the years, a lot of people shifted allegiance to other stores or to Amazon and Kindle, perhaps even with the slight guilt of an ex-lover, the cramped store remained one of the city’s landmarks. Many old-timers will mourn its passing, much like Rhythm House in Kala Ghoda or Café Naaz at Hanging Gardens, or the stone chimneys that punctuated the city before chrome and glass brazenly took over.
For the next seven days, after he finishes lectures at Sir JJ College of Architecture, associate professor Y D Pitkar will be making a pitstop at Strand. As someone buying books here for 40 years, Pitkar has fond memories of Shanbhag's “good smile” and the store’s tactile bounty of rare books. An old-school booklover who loves to touch, feel and smell books, Pitkar finds it hard to graduate to buying ebooks. “You can’t smell books online,” Pitkar said.
While pursuing his MBA at Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies in 1972, Sam Balsara, chairman of ad agency Madison World, used to frequent Strand for hard-to-find management books. “I was always amazed at how the staff could pull out the right book from the right shelf,” Balsara said, recalling that the arrangement of books at the store didn’t make navigation easy.
Author Amish Tripathi, whose school Cathedral & John Connon was a stone’s throw away, would scour the shop for history books. “Unlike other book shops that used to store books and music CDs, Strand was a pure bookshop,” he said. Like the typewriter and fountain pen, Strand may have lost its USP a while ago. But it has remained a beloved word for those who cherish a world in which, at least sometimes, everything doesn’t have a point.
