Journalism of Courage
The city’s skyline is dotted with colourful bill-boards,but the traditional bill-board painters have been relegated into obscurity
When Kuch Kuch Hota Hain (KKHH ) released in 1998,bill-board painters in Pune heard the death knell. The films flex posters were all around. That was thirteen years ago,when the flex-poster revolution had just dawned. A decade later,the community of the bill-board painters in the city is fighting a losing battle.
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 didnt 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.”
