Saturday 30 March 2013

A SHORT STORY ON RICKSHAW ART


Once upon a time... in the country of Bangladesh (no, it's not only hurricanes, disasters, famines... there are actual people there), in the capital city of Dhaka, if you take a big magnifying glass, and skip through the pollution, the jams, the noises of horns, you'll see thousands of bikes running its streets, like blood in its veins.
Well, if you are careful, these are not exactly bikes, more human powered taxi-bikes, or, like Bengali call them, rickshaws. Not exactly thousands, but hundreds of thousands, around six hundred thousands, in a city of fourteen million souls. Hundred thousand bikes means twelve lakh rickshaw wallahs (or twelve hundred thousands pedicab drivers, if you may), but it means thousands of rickshaw garages, thousands of mechanics, thousands of rickshawwallahs dormitories.
If you happen to look even more closely, you'll see that in the dull, hot and humid streets of Dhaka, rickshaws bear the most colorful, extravagant, cheerful arts of Dhaka's streets. The rickshaws bear paintings on their backs, of almost anything: Taj Mahal, bollywood actors, animals, peacocks, ...
At the maximum zoon of your magnifying lens, you will see the builders, rickshaw painters, the artists thanks to whom the cycling paintings circle the streets. You could see Shafoan, Shamim, or Tipu, hunched over a tin plate, painting each square inch of the rickshaw.
And then ... well, the video can explain it better than me.
The article is from:

No comments:

Post a Comment