Escape to the world of fantasy….

The message was simple, ‘I saw your work. its really good. Can you guys come and paint at our learning centre in Shahpur Jat.’

Jey replied, ‘If you guys work with kids, then why not, but let me ask Meenakshi first.’

Within three days of this conversation on Facebook we landed up in a flat in Shahpur Jat, which was a learning centre for kids. Here we met Avanti fellows and eleven kids who threw random strange maths problems for us to solve before allowing us to talk.

We fixed the color day and asked children to bring useless objects from their homes. We had plans of creating a collage with random stuff and colors for the learning center.

On the designated day we had a small chit chat session where we asked them what their dream jobs irrespective of their academic training are.

Fellows who were trained engineers revealed they wanted to be writers, businessmen, bakery owners, agriculturists and so on. While many students shared their dream of becoming cricketer, another singer and two girls wanted to travel four corners of India.

One fellow wanted to open a dhaba, another school. Few of them were already running their own small business and wanted to become entrepreneurs.

Soon we started working and all of us got divided in three groups.

A big wall which had a small window was selected. Taking window as their main inspiration the participants decided to paint window like frames as an escape door to their fantasy world that comprised of open nature on one side of the window and the ‘sweet’ world of chocolate and cookies on the other side.

Vani, Sanchi, Henna, Utpal, Vatsal, Nitin pitched in furiously to paint the trees and leaves.

It was a big group so forgive us to forget others’ names.

One side of the wall came alive with two big trees with strong orange and green colors. Third group was sad as they were not able to figure out how to go about creating their ‘sweet’ world and got stuck after making an orange frame.

Swarnima a fellow and Kajal a student looked sad. In between, Sanchi was worried that walls should not get messed as they used the space for official meetings.

We told her, ‘DO NOT WORRY’ but she didn’t seem convinced.

A student named Vishal came with the idea of painting Mario and he did a sketch. Mario is a cartoon character. Mario was painted by all the fellows.

While the first wall got more and more colorful the other wall looked empty and people working on that wall were sad.

It was then that the Master Artist intervened. Meenakshi had a serious look on both the walls and we decided to connect both of them in a way only Meenakshi could have imagined.

She with the help of other participants extended the branches of trees on to the other side of the wall. The branches looked like hands embracing the ‘sweet’ fantasy world on the other side of the window.

Most of the fellows wanted to put their hand prints on the wall so the leaves of the trees and hand prints merged signifying the desired harmony between nature, human and our fantasy world.

The fantasy world on the other wall came alive with the Red dragon which was actually a broken ironing machine. Yes broken ironing machine that was painted by a student.

Another Mario kind of a guy came up near the fantasy world. Actually it was a fellow whom kids missed.

We won’t name him.

Once both the murals got connected, everyone felt delighted. Even Swarnima, Vani and Kajal heaved a sigh of relief that their wall looked equally good as the other wall.

Sanchi smiled. “Walls look good.”

So the day ended with smiles on the faces once again.

Since we have completed this mural, we have been getting messages from the fellows almost every day saying how much they have enjoyed it.

Thanks guys. We also enjoyed creating the real and fantasy world with you all.