BENGALURU: Around mid-April, Susan Thomas, campus director at National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), received an unexpected call from an engineer from an IT firm in the city. The engineer had just come back from a six-day trip to Tamil Nadu and returned to find something amiss at Whitefield Railway Station. The usual apricot-toned walls now displayed paintings of two figures, some gears and mechanical parts and some flowers. A closer look at the wall told her the figures were Ada Lovelace, the first IT programmer, and Charles Babbage, the father of computers. While one wall is dedicated to both, the other displays just Lovelace.
“The engineer was so happy to see women in the IT space get recognition and was thrilled to see Lovelace and women programmers being acknowledged in a public space like this,” says Thomas. This, in turn, thrilled Thomas and her team of 25 students who had worked on the murals earlier last month.
The idea, she says, came from the strong mural culture at the institute’s campus, where many artworks created by students adorn its walls. But this time, the institute wanted to use their students’ talent to beautify a public space and dispel the notion that government buildings are always dull and monochrome. “But we didn’t want to produce art just for art’s sake. We wanted to present a larger political context and message,” explains Thomas.
Finding a muse
After a consultation with railway officials, the institute was given a choice between KR Puram, Banaswadi and Whitefield stations. Once the IT hub was decided upon, Thomas and her students knew technology would be the central theme of their mural. “While brainstorming, students came up with names of Sundar, Zuckerberg and Gates. But no one mentioned any woman’s name. I asked them about Ada Lovelace and none had heard about her. That’s when I elaborated the story of how Babbage and Lovelace collaborated, but history was unkind to not give any credit to her,” said Thomas. While the paints and scaffolding were provided by the railway ministry, the rest of the mural was done pro-bono by the institute.
The idea was approved by April 6 and over the next week, 25 students worked in shifts to bring the idea to life on their 20-something feet high canvas. Though fun, the work wasn’t entirely easy all the time, says Rayna Arora, a second-year student who worked on the murals. Being approached by inebriated men was always a threat and since the team involved many girls, either a police officer or the railway caretaker were always around. “It was too hot in the afternoon so we would work from 4pm onwards and some nights, this went on till 3am. Scaling up an idea on a wall has its own challenges, you think you’re painting an eye but when you step back, it might just look different. And it’s never easy to get straight lines when you project an idea onto a wall,” says Arora.
The work was finally unveiled mid-April and though ecstatic that their work is on display in public, the students do harbour one concern: People dirtying the wall again. An official from the Railway Ministry CE spoke to, however, said that since the walls had been beautified, this would deter people from littering or spitting around the premises.