City on canvas

With the image of the city going down each day, a group of true Delhiites has got together to remind people about all the good things they should be proud of. Nishant Singh visits the paintings that are part of the DIlY campaign

Steeped in history, Delhi as a city, has always been an inspiration for poets, artists and writers. This city has something mysterious about it. That’s why it has seen many foreign nationals coming as tourists and made it their home.

Film-maker Thomas Ellis is one such man — a French national who has made Delhi his adopted home. Ellis has been spearheading a campaign since September called Delhi, I love you or DIlY (as pronounced in Hindi), which is meant to last for 30 months. But it is not aimed to focus on the things that Delhi has become unpopular and notorious for, as most other Delhi-centric campaigns are. Rather, DIlY wishes to celebrate the city and the people who stay here and love it — everything that is positive about Delhi.

To kick-start the campaign, Ellis and his team had initially launched a campaign through social media wherein the hashtag #MyDilliStory can be used by any lover of Delhi to tell the story they share with the city via Twitter. The winning entries in this online competition have now been painted in public spaces, conferring the city’s culture of art and diversity into words. The wall of the flyover adjacent to Delhi’s Tibetan market has become alive once again due to these painted messages about Delhi.

The tweets are in Hindi, English, Punjabi and Urdu as these are the languages spoken most in the city. Significantly, they have been painted by signboard painters who have suffered a loss of livelihood due to digital printing techniques, to give them visibility on a local and international platform.

The aim of DIlY isn’t just to activate public spaces with stories and poetry but also bringing the real magic of hand painted typographies back into those spaces. #Mydillistory story is in fact the perfect example of what we at DIlY are about. It is a project that got the government, private and educational institutes as well as creative practitioners together. A project that celebrates the city, its languages and its people,” Ellis says.

The end of the project will see 12 short films about Delhi stitched together as a feature film which will become part of the ‘Cities of love’ series that has previously been made on Paris and New York.

The six entries of the #MyDilliStory are as follows

• E sheher teri shaan me hum kalam karte hai, mere hosle bhi ab tujhe salam karte hain (in Hindi)
• Waqt ho agar toh aao Dilli ki rahon mein. Tarik chupi hai yahan ke daron diwaron mein (in Urdu)
• Dilli ne diye hai yaar mujhe, #Dilli ne diya pyaar. Karti hoon aitbaar mai iska, Ispar Jaan Nisaar (in Punjabi)
• They said time travel is impossible. And then I visited Old Delhi.
• Kitaba vich vekhiya sunehri hai dilli haneri rah vich dopehri hai dilli (in Punjabi, In books I had read, that Delhi is beautiful. Even in darkness, it is the force of light).
•  Aake to dekhiye darbaar-e-Dilli me, yeh mohabbat ka nahi, dilwaalo ka chaman hai (in Urdu)  Translation: Come and see the court of Delhi, its not a city of love, it's a city of people with hearts.

photos: Pankaj Kumar