graffiti in delhi

Graffiti

The art of painting on walls. Subversive. Explosive. Infantile yet skilled.

Only recently have the youth in Delhi got their hands on the can and headed out to do some serious tagging. The drop in the price of what's known as a dollar can, influx of graffiti tourism is what I can figure . . . and of course the city obliging us with flyovers practically everywhere! Zine was the first tag I noticed around and it spread all over the place, followed by a bunch of others adorning or defacing to some the walls of the city at large.

Over the last six months I have seen more and more appear, elaborate signatures, scrawled tags, artistic stencils, jilted romantics, plain trippers and even spread the message evangelists are now to be seen on this once virgin and seemingly infinite canvas. Perhaps it’s a case of you only see what you want to, but I have always had the impression that graffiti was a first world game and unless some political cause or religious fervor was fueling the adventurous, it remained in college campuses and gents rest rooms.

We paint with brushes and blackboard paint, it’s the cheapest, I remember as a kid writing up save the narmada slogans to protest the sardar sarovar dam. Slap slap with a brush to get the message across. In Calcutta, the writing on the wall, though invariably undecipherable to a non Bengali was that of inherently artistic people. In Delhi we have none of that! The most common graffiti I saw as a kid growing up in Delhi was FUCK OFF, often misspelled and I'm guessing scrawled by some drunk with left over spray paint from a car touch up. It wasn't till I hear of the wall project in Bombay that I realised what Delhi is missing out on. Far from artistic creativity, in Delhi most obvious graffiti walls function as urinals. From this we shall rise!!

Let us all rejoice in being toys, and letting our voice be heard. Let cars not rule our planet, let the haze of oil and its myriad incarnations be lifted, let us produce for once not consume . . . at the risk of sounding like Obama, we need a change.