Vandalism of Mumbai Wall Project

It was just Sunday when I was admiring the pictures of “Wall Project, Phase -II” shared by my Mumbai friends on Facebook, Twitter etc and within a day I get to read about vandalism of those lovely walls! This was actually a joint initiative of BMC and Mumbai citizens where a number of people turned out to paint and beautify the wall running along Tulsi Pipe Road, between Mahim and Matunga in Mumbai. Wall project as a concept has definitely grown noticeably since its inception; in fact what started just as an idea by a group of few enthusiastic people to do something to one of the compound walls in Bandra has become a large scale city wide beautification project now. Not only this is an interesting way of transforming the city walls, it is also an innovative way of preventing them from turning into a spittoon or cuspidor. I have personally seen this project on walls of Lalbaug, Bangalore and it’s simply awesome. I’ve been commuting on the same road daily for many months now but after those paintings are done the whole area has got a different vibrancy & liveliness altogether.

As a part of this initiative, BMC started the second stage last weekend where whole lot of bright and lovely pictures were painted by the citizens of Mumbai, some were based on alphabets whereas some had interesting messages. My personal favorite ones were "म से माँ" or "Ghar Ja ke Kar" :-). You can check the whole collection here. But within a day, all hard-work & efforts of citizens were just scrapped by the promoters of the movies Aladin, Gair & London Dreams. They didn’t even think twice before pasting the movie posters all over those painted walls!!! If you look at before & after images of the walls, you just can’t refrain yourself from a feeling of disgust and appall towards this insensitive sabotage.

Citizens are angry and rightly so at this step of movie marketers which has resulted to an outrage all across social media against this inconsiderate act of promoters. Many people have decided to boycott these movies. Seeing the repercussion, few actors and other associated people have apologized for this act and instructed to remove the posters, but the question is will removal of pictures solve the problem? Won’t those paper posters leave paste marks on the paintings? And how about their attitude or approach towards cityscapes? Isn’t it highly insensitive to go ahead and paste them at the first place? On one hand we have such bunch of enthusiastic people who spend their weekends towards enriching their cities and on other we have such thoughtless bunch who didn’t even think twice before ruining it. And no, I do NOT think that it’s the mistake of those poor poster guys who had stuck those posters, they have just executed what was instructed to them; it was surely the mistake of the planners who would have decided on the areas for their poster campaign. Also on second thought, in an OOH & hoarding dominated city like Mumbai, do we really need to spoil any wall (be it painted or plain ones) now for movie promotion??? Well, there are definitely more interesting mediums available for movie promotion than spoiling the beauty of your own city…