New Wall of Fame

Their fictitious names usually don't exceed five letters. Zine, Zake, Daku, Sun1 and Tyler are all graffiti and street artists, who must not reveal their real identities in order to do their jobs. Some of them need to sneak out into the night with a spray-paint in hand, while the rest splash the neighborhood walls with bright colours at daytime.

"Unlike most of the others, instead of going clubbing in the nights, I prefer hitting the streets with a stencil in my hand," says Tyler, an art-visualiser by day whose pseudonym is inspired from the film Fight Club's protagonist's name, Tyler Durden. His recent series of somewhat subversive stencil sketches along the walls of Andheri have caught people's attention. His art, Tyler says, is an outlet to the repressed voice of dissent rising out of urban frustration; a reply to the advertising billboards that, in his opinion, are an "abuse to people's conscience". "I see street art as an essential tool to maintain democracy; there has to be a message thrown back to the multinational corporates who are communicating to the people, by way of advertising, wrong messages."

One of his fellow graffiti-artists — Delhi-based Daku's recent works — was of a similar kind. Daku had written an English abuse in Hindi, in seven places starting from South Mumbai. This stemmed from the reactions of the urban youth to Dhoble's policies. "When I came to Mumbai, I found out that everyone had to say something about Dhoble; the whole city seemed paranoid," says the artist, who recently painted a satirical piece on the gas price rise.

Many of their peers, on the other hand, are not interested in any social commentary, their art is based on the joy of colours, adventure and fun. Delhi-based Zine, for example, started doing graffiti because of his love for colours, while Mumbai-based Sun1 was drawn towards it because of his fascination with cartoons. Similarly, Daku's fascination towards signboard painting and love for letters prompted him to take up graffiti. Most of Daku's works are reminiscent of the kitschy, Devanagari fonts seen on Indian highway trucks.

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