As the paint flakes

Ritesh Patil from Pyramid Advertising takes a long pause before he vocalises the troubles that face him at the moment. “They don’t exist anymore,” he sounds convinced of the of extinction of his clan. “We used to be so in-demand. And then flex printing came about and there was no work.” Just like that,in a city where the sky is often filled with hoardings big and small,billboard painters were out of work. Today their adda near Good Luck Chowk is devoid of any action and hardly any artiste sits there. Even the agencies which used to claim close relations with them now struggle to recall contacts that could lead to the bill-board artistes.

At Captions Advertising,however,the enquiry is met with a prompt answer,a contact which leads to Rasul Painter. He has been working with Captions for many years,but now he paints just the contact numbers of advertising agencies on empty boards. Near Vijay Talkies on Laxmi road,another painter called Sriram Sutar replaces the red brush in the paint box after he has finished giving finishing touches to the last digit on a flex board. Sutar has known no other work in the past 40 years,but finds the work now rather “boring”. He has been surviving on the meager income that he gets by painting contact numbers on empty bill boards. Abhasaheb Patil,a resident of Bibewadi,often accompanies Sutar. “Our work has decreased drastically in the last decade. Now there is virtually nothing to do. Some of us tried and got into new businesses,but a lot of us,who have spent entire lifetimes painting,are still stuck.” Sanjay Pawar nowadays designs for various organisations,but longs to paint again on a billboard. “I am working for an Amul outlet inside the Infosys campus. I paint on the topic assigned to me on a 5 x15 foot wall. A lot amongst us didn’t try to move into other jobs,primarily because we didn’t know what else to do.”

As a newly printed banner of a beauty product rises at a square,Pawar comments,”We used to make such interesting things on the board. Now a lot of us just create the structures for billboards. The real deal is no longer our work.”