There’s nothing special about the appearance of the streets leading to the AIDS Society, Wadala, but Saturday afternoon was different. A bunch of youngsters with buckets of paint made for a colourful sight. They braved a humid afternoon to paint murals on the walls of this street to spread AIDS awareness in the city. These youngsters are part of project called MAD that stands for Murals and Doodles. The brainchild of Raashi Raghunath, a 19-year-old student from St. Xaviers College, Mumbai, this particular project aims at launching a campaign for the Mumbai District Aids Control Society by enabling artists to engage with the cause through their artworks.
A workforce of 20 college students fleshed out concepts on the integrity of getting tested for AIDS, the relationship between an AIDS affected mother and her child, and the domino effect of HIV positive sexual partners and painted the 30 x 10 feet walls of the AIDS society. “I think Mumbaikars have a very apathetic nature towards their city and we want to creatively make a difference. The main motto of MAD is we want people to look at the extremely vivacious and underrated force of labour that is college students, and enable them to explore their creative side. This project involves more than just creativity. It’s about getting teenagers to talk about a subject as important as AIDS,” says Raashi, who has also worked on restoring a mammoth wall outside Dockyard road railway station.
Her passion for social work is where it all began. “MAD started about two years ago because I wanted to test the waters in the field of social work. And this seemed very doable. It’s actually a fun way of making a difference and doing something productive with the talent that is already there. Students in colleges are very high-spirited and are capable of doing some great work if they are given a little direction,” Raashi says.
The idea sounds simple on paper — select a wall you think needs to be restored, seek permissions from authorities and make a Facebook page to scout for volunteers. Raashi works with her core team of five students from other colleges such as Ruia, Lala Lajpat Rai and K.C. College. “I decided to do this independently and not through any pre-established platform. I did not know how big this was going to be, I wanted it to be an NGO of it’s own. Xavier’s is more into planning a fest. This isn’t a fest, this is an initiative and that’s why it is different. Also fests tend to get very hierarchical. For this initiative students from any age group or any college can join,” she points out.
And how hard or easy was getting a go-ahead from the authorities, we ask. “The Dockyard Road project was actually very anticlimactic. I walked up to the stationmaster and told him what I had planned and he was totally fine with it. Since the stationmaster owns the wall, I did not have to contact anyone else. But after that, whenever we have tried approaching the BMC for other walls, it has been very difficult. You need a week to find out the correct person to approach, you have a special way of asking, but it takes a lot time, they don’t trust you at all and they want to know why you want to do it, how you want to do it. There is no way I can tell them what I have in mind even before I have the wall,” she says. Convincing the AIDS society was however a cakewalk, as they saw that it would benefit both sides, she adds.
Raashi’s team mates are nearly drenched with paint but they make some time to speak to us as well. Shlomoh Samuel, a mass media student from the core team, says, “During the railway station project, a man in his late fifties came up to me and said ‘What are you doing here, I haven’t seen something this beautiful before,’ and it made my day. Random strangers talk to us, there are some creepy ones too who keep staring, but the good ones make it worthwhile.”
The current project will continue till next summer, but plans for their next one are already on board. “We have a wall in Malabar hill which is owned by the BMC and we are waiting for the final permissions. The theme will be saving water since the water works department owns the wall. We will be experimenting with a different age group of artistes, we’ll try to mix and match commercial artistes and post grad fine arts students. They would have a different understanding of expressions and murals and we’d like to explore that,” Raashi says.
