With Holi fast approaching, all of us are presumably busy planning out how to make most of this festival of colours. But while our preparations are for a personal celebration, Rouble Nagi, a Mumbai based artist is bringing colour into the lives of slum-dwellers in Pune. Nagi, through her NGO Rouble Nagi Art Foundation, has taken it upon herself to beautify the slums of Pune under her “Misaal Mumbai” initiative.
With this project, Rouble’s organization has painted the walls of different slum areas in Pune in gleeful hues, earning applause online. But the project itself is about a great deal more than just painting a bunch of walls and increasing the city’s aesthetic value. According to Nagi herself, the project is just a medium to initiate conversations about and communication with the people who live in these slums and to affect a change on their mindset. The Rouble Nagi Art Foundation focuses on providing a better living condition in terms of hygiene and sanitation to city slum dwellers.
Even though NGOs like Rouble’s aim at bettering the social conditions of poverty-stricken people, the initial phase of the work is always the hardest as people are sceptic of social workers and their intentions. Rather than trying to persuade people going from door to door, Rouble’s idea is to engage them through art. Her idea is to draw people into the organization’s activities willingly rather than trying to randomly show up at someone’s doorstep out of nowhere and interfere into their daily lives.
Breaking down the bottom line of her strategy, Rouble Nagi explained that when people in an area would notice that a group of artists are painting their walls, it would naturally anchor their curiosity and that way starting up conversations becomes easier without uninvitedly showing up in people’s personal space.
“Misaal Mumbai” is really an exemplary project that has grabbed eyeballs for all the right reasons. The simplicity of its approach and the universality of its medium have made impressed people all over the internet, serving one of the purposes of the project itself. Opening up conversations about the marginalization of the urban poor is one step taken in the right direction to ensure better living conditions for them. People like Rouble Nagi are the right kind of social justice warriors that we need now more than ever, to paint our cities bright in those corners that have been deprived of light way too long.
