3 friends team up to beautify wall with murals in Bengaluru

BENGALURU: Three IT employees and their friends teamed up recently to reclaim and beautify the wall bordering CV Raman Hospital. They painted the greyscale panels lining the hospital with murals of local and national legends, who have contributed to the country’s growth.
The project was conceptualised in mid-April when Dushyant Dubey, Sameer Kulkarni, and Satyajit Indramohan were travelling along CV Raman Road and discussing the grim condition of the road frequented by thousands daily.
As residents of the area, they wished to do something to make the space more vibrant. They approached local MLA S Raghu and discussed their idea of painting a small part of the wall. He not only gave them permission to do so, but also requested that they cover more area than originally planned.
The trio brought together a team of 19 people, including eight painters and eight illustrators, and set about the task in May. The core group aside, the others were hired and the finances to procure materials and artists were provided by the MLA.
Dubey, creative director of the project, told TOI his friends conceptualised it and he looked after the illustration part. “The artwork is entirely original. It isn’t an inspired replica of anything you will find on Google. Our illustrators came from Colombia, Italy, India and many other parts of the world. We call the redone wall the ‘Freedom Wall’. The idea was to commemorate freedom fighters, famous rulers, scientists, environmentalists, etc. We have covered 400ft of the wall and painted 36 Indian personalities on it.”
A unique feature of the murals is each one of them has a portrait and a recreated scene of a popular story associated with the person. Each segment has a QR code that can be scanned to retrieve more information on the personality, as the trio has linked encyclopaedic websites to each part of the wall.
“Going ahead, we would also like to record a narration about the scene with audio of the characters. This will allow people to scan the code and listen to the story on their phone,” Dubey explained.
Since their phone numbers have been painted in a corner of the redone wall, the team has been getting a lot of calls from people either appreciating their work or offering them other projects. The team is currently considering an offer from the Gujarat government to create a freedom wall in Ahmedabad.