KOCHI: A few days ago, a bunch of students, corporates and youngsters from different walks of life across the city were engaged in scrapping the moss-infested compound walls from Maharaja’s College to the General Hospital.
After almost a day of cleaning, they collectively gave the scrapped-up wall a fresh layer of lime paint, while the skilled ones went about decorating the white space with a fusion of wall art.
And after three days of labour, the entire stretch of wall is now a splash of different colours, which at some places twist and converges to give forms, while at some other places runs like water out of a breached dam.
“This is our attempt to bring happiness into the lives of children who are caught inside the confines of the General Hospital,” said Rashmi Deepak, the founder of the Amaara Foundation that conceived the idea.
“The wall is directly facing a set of windows of the hospital and there are a lot of children there. Everything is very dull and boring inside the hospital. So, we wanted to give them a sight worth looking at, full of brightness and colour,” she said.
Amaara Foundation is an initiative formed five years ago by a dedicated group of volunteers who invested in their time to impart life skills and English to schoolchildren.
The foundation volunteers reached out to the Maharajas’ College Union and Students’ Biennale volunteers and pitched to them the idea of decorating the wall outside the General Hospital as part of Amaara’s ‘Ende Kochi’ initiative.
‘Ende Kochi’ is basically an exhortation to the Kochiites to get out and do something to make Kochi and the life here more beautiful, Rashmi said.
Basically, Rashmi said, the wall painting is an initiative meant as a public contribution for the common good of the people in Kochi.
“We could have done it as a part of the Kochi Corporation’s one-Kochi-one-colour campaign. But we didn’t, because we wanted to make an independent contribution,” Rashmi said.
One-Kochi-one-colour campaign is an initiative to provide a unanimous brand colour (blue) to Kochi, while coinciding the exercise with a string of cleanliness and beautification drives, like the ‘Pink City’ campaign of Jaipur.
Close to 100 people were part of this initiative, said Maharaja’s College Union chairman P Nazil, who along with Piousmon Sunny did all the painting on the wall.