A colourful ode to the spirit of the city

While the city’s traffic is as busy as any other day, at a street in south Delhi’s Saket is a group which is painting on the wall in Hindi. Using colours like red, green and pink, the group is painting one of the stories received for #MyDilliStory campaign. An initiative of the city-based social and cultural movement — ‘Delhi I love You’ (DILY) alongwith Delhi Government and Twitter India to enable a positive shift in the image of the city.

The three-week long storytelling competition from September 5-26 saw more than 13,000 tweets from people sharing their stories, anecdotes, experiences and tales of Delhi. While 40 of the best tweets will be painted on the city’s prominent public walls in the next two months, the first of them was painted on Saket City Hospital’s wall recently.
 
“It is a project to highlight the good stuff in the city. We have done enough Delhi bashing. We keep saying that Delhi is unsafe and it keeps getting unsafe,” says Aastha Chauhan, a part of the DILY team. She describes, “We invited people to tell us Delhi related incidents, jokes, poetry, anecdotes or any text one likes, in any of the four languages — Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and English. That was the basic idea of the project.”

The campaign saw enthusiastic participation from Delhiites and even people from other cities. Another member of the DILY team, Simran Gill chips in, “They are not in your face messages. None of them are preachy. It is just what Delhi really is.”

“We combine both Twitter and hand-painted typology for this campaign. For us, it’s very exciting to see Twitter  becoming the new age way of sharing texts and ideas. So, it became a project about languages, literature, popular culture and arts,” describes Chauhan. 

Some of the top tweets that have surfaced during this campaign indicate that Twitterati hail the city as the ‘heart of India’, for it is a blend of cultures, traditions and languages. However, fast-paced city life maybe, Delhi lovers believe it has its passion and emotions intact, with plenty to inspire them creatively.

Pratiksha Rao, spokesperson, media team, Twitter India says, “With this Delhi-centric campaign, affinity for Delhi has succeeded in gaining a new momentum. This campaign has truly showcased the positivity, nostalgia and emotions that people  have for the city.”

Talking about the milieu that Delhi offers, many believe that the city welcomes everyone with open arms. One such is Prashant Shrivastava whose winning tweet was the first to be painted.

He shares with Metrolife, “I wrote directly from my heart. For me, Delhi is mini-India where people of different cultures live. Though the city is widely criticised for being inhuman, there are good things that the city offers which needs to be highlighted.”

The 34-year-old, who shifted to Noida two years ago from Udaipur, Rajasthan,
says  he “never felt like an outsider.”

While Chauhan mentions that the city keeps people on tenterhooks owing to its demanding lifestyle, she sums up with one of the popular tweets, Muskuraye Janaab, Aap Dilli mein hain.