Street artist

Streets. The mangled limbs of a city in transit,twisting through the Delhi of once-sacred cows and lazy autowallahs.

Streets. The mangled limbs of a city in transit,twisting through the Delhi of once-sacred cows and lazy autowallahs. Till last year,Rohit Sharma travelled the length and breadth of the city through the honeycomb of these roads every day,from his home in Nangloi,west Delhi,to south Delhihe has a studio in Malviya Nagar and he teaches drawing at the National Institute of Advertising,in Sainik Farmsand back,covering nearly 100 km.

At his exhibitionat India Habitat Centreof striking watercolours,oils and a lone ink-on-newspaper that mirror his romance with the roads,the 30-year-old,a graduate in painting from the College of Arts,picks up an apple snail wriggling on the soil outside and places it out of harms way. A recurring theme in his works is the cowas kamdhenu at modernitys crossroads,as a calf reclining against ever-new Delhi,as the modern cow with a milktruck for a body. In todays world,anyone who comes in the way,even if its a goddess,is a nuisance. The black-and-white cow Ive painted represents the sacredness of and the disregard for cows in Delhi, says Sharma,who has been painting for over a decade now and conducts workshops at India Habitat Centre over weekends.

The milktruck with the tail was inspired by a young niece of one of his students,who was inexorably convinced that milk came not from the cows that lounged on dirty pavements but from Mother Dairy. Cows have all but disappeared from Delhi. All the milk now comes from Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, he says. Next,Sharma is painting the donkeysthey have innocence written all over their faceand dogs of Delhi.

Of course,wheels are the other leitmotif in Romancing the Roads. The painter of golden vintage cars,nostalgic Ambassadors and yellow-and-black taxicabs is also the young man with the backpack who is pushing the ubiquitous autorickshaw with the demurring driver in Convincing for Destination.

Sharma has lived all his life in the Capital. When I was in Mumbai briefly,I felt the city was always in a rush. Delhi has a subtlety about it,life here is quieter, says the artist,who captured the citys major monuments in realistic watercolour four years ago. As Sharma talks with pride of the presence of the past in the city (how Delhi has inherited not just monuments but streets like Chandni Chowk that have remained largely unchanged in the last 25 years),the red-washed reality of road rage,the waiting at signals,and the venous crossroads in his paintings seem like the other side of the double-headed cow,the one facing the future.

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