A protest against homogeneity

Gautam Benegal, Mumbai-based filmmaker & painter, tries to hold on to the city’s disappearing charms in an upcoming Goa exhibition. Suprateek Chatterjee reports.

Gautam Benegal, 47, likes to keep things simple. The animation filmmaker and painter, a resident of Mumbai’s Goregaon, chose to meet at a modest bar close to the glitzy mall in the eastern side of the suburb instead of a coffee shop in the mall. “This is my watering hole,” he grins, relaxing over an afternoon beer.

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Motioning in the general direction of the mall, he says, “All these guys who work at the food court — do you think they eat there? No, they probably go to a khau galli on the opposite side and have a vada pav for lunch before coming back and serving people coffee and burgers.” Taking a sip of his beer he adds, “The problem is that we’re trying to get rid of these places.”

For Benegal, a National Award-winning animation filmmaker (he won ‘Best Animation Film’ for his 2008 film The Prince And The Crown of Stone) who has been in the field for 22 years, the gentrification of the city is a cause for concern. A year ago, he held an exhibition that mourned the demise of a corner Irani eatery. That exhibition was a subset of an upcoming show called Continuum — The Enduring Spaces of Bombay, to be held in south Goa from January 21.

Having come to the city in 1989 to learn animation under veteran Indian animator Ram Mohan, Benegal remembers falling in love with Mumbai’s inclusiveness. Mohan is the man behind the animation sequences in films such as Shatranj Ke Khilari (1977) and commercials such as the one for Vicks cough lozenges. “These spaces were frequented by the rich and poor alike,” says Benegal. “People had conversations, regardless of religion, community or status. Today, they are just glued to their screens.”

He talks about a Facebook meme (an image that gets shared online, sometimes with variations) he saw recently that depicted three panels of a man sitting in front of the computer and one of him sleeping. The panels were captioned ‘At work’, ‘Watching a movie’ and ‘Hanging out with friends’. “For an artist, there will soon be nothing left to depict any more. This isn’t just about economics; it’s also a loss from an aesthetic standpoint. What am I going to paint, a man wearing a uniform standing behind a counter in an air-conditioned mall?”

The points he raises needn’t be applied to just Mumbai. With the kind of rapid gentrification and real-estate development taking place across other metros, not to mention tier-II and tier-III cities, Benegal feels that the Indian city in general is losing its charm. “Neighbourhoods in the city are already starting to look the same,” he says. “Pretty soon, people will start sounding and looking the same.”