Putting Marol on the Global Street Art Map

For years, whenever someone asked where I lived, I said 'near Powai' or 'close to the airport'. Saying 'Marol' meant a follow-up question I'd have to answer anyway. As someone who grew up here, that always sat uncomfortably with me.

Marol had character, history, people from every background imaginable. What it didn't have was a face. Around 2015, I started looking at walls. The first thing I noticed was that the painting was only part of what was happening. People who would normally never speak to each other were suddenly standing side by side, discussing colours, holding ladders, sharing chai.

Through Wicked Broz and later Marol Art Village, I started building the infrastructure around those moments. There was no funding and no sponsor. Just the slow accumulation of trust, one wall at a time.

The clearest proof came when artists from Brazil's Keep It Real Crew painted the clubhouse at Eco Park. Families came downstairs. People called friends over. The clubhouse got repainted two months later and that never bothered me. The afternoon had already happened.

The Ladies First Festival in 2019 was a turning point. The Military Road Residents Welfare Association helped secure permissions and organise at a scale we hadn't reached before. That was the moment it stopped feeling like something we were sneaking past the city and started feeling like something the city was joining.

Today I visit our hotspots and find murals I had nothing to do with. There are over 500 murals across Marol now, all without a single rupee of external funding. Covered by National Geographic, Mid-Day, and the World Atlas of Street Art.