VILLUPURAM: Nearly every day, when the fast-flowing traffic dies down, RM Sekar, a man in his early sixties armed with a bicycle piled high with posters and a tub of freshly made glue, gears up for a mission. Pedalling through the night from Villupuram to Chennai, Tiruvannamalai, Tiruchy, and beyond, he embraces the lowkey world of billposting, no matter how tiring the ride gets. For him, every new wall is a blank canvas to display his craftsmanship with utmost precision, but never once against his principles.
When a grieving family approaches Sekar to paste an obituary poster, he does not charge. “People would be mourning the loss of a family member, how can I charge for something that announces a life has ended,” he says. For small tuition centres scraping by on thin margins, he asks for far less than his standard rate, sometimes accepting whatever they can offer. These acts of conscience are what set this 62-year-old poster man from Villupuram apart.
Sekar has been navigating the unglamorous world of poster-sticking for over four decades. His work begins after 10 pm and ends early in the morning. Despite depending heavily on political contracts for income, he refuses assignments that promote ideologies, which he considers divisive, even when the money may have been good. “I believe in equality and respect for every individual. I cannot go against my own ethics for the sake of money,” he says.
These are not the words of someone who has had it easy. Sekar was once arrested for pasting protest posters in support of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during the Sri Lankan Civil War, and was released only after the intervention of political leaders. He raised his son and daughter entirely on this income, through years when the trade was far less predictable than it looked. Earnings that flowed more freely in the 1990s and early 2000s have since thinned; stricter regulations, shrinking wall space etc have all cut into his work. Where he once pasted nearly 500 posters a day, he now manages around 200.
Yet none of that has changed the way he operates. After four decades, Sekar, better known by his nickname ‘Padayappa’— earned after he cycled across 50-plus theatres to watch and paste posters for actor Rajinikanth’s 1999 blockbuster — has become something of an institution in his locality. Parties seek him out not just for his skill but for his acute understanding of neighbourhoods: which streets lean which way politically, where a poster will be respected and where it will spark conflict, among others.
He pastes with a craftsman’s precision and makes his glue from scratch at every location. “From two-bit to four, six-bit, my posters will be pasted perfectly without each bit overlapping one another,” he proudly says.
What looks like visual clutter on city walls is, for Sekar, a life’s work carried out with consistency, care, and humanity that the trade rarely asks for but that he has never stopped offering.
(Edited by Arya AJ)