my life is a beautiful struggle

Enamel on concrete. 50 ft x 15 ft. Home for Mentally Deficient Children, Mankhurd, Mumbai, India. March 2006.

This mural occurred in one of the most dynamic and responsive environments I’ve ever worked in.  I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to work in this situation, where I was interacting with and training mentally and physically challenged children and men in painting. Though the idea for the painting was provided by Government of Maharastra officials who oversee the MDC home, the process of putting together the mural was more spontaneous than most. Each aspect, from the plant life to the sunset to the clouds and the birds all emerged spontaneously from the minds of the MDC students, and we just went with the flow.

The painting was completed in collaboration with three entities as well as myself (Ja.In.Us in accordance with BS1000): Initiative, a non-for-profit umbrella NGO in Mumbai, the College for Social Work Internship Program, and professional artist S. M. Hussain from Mumbai.  As a team, we put together this work despite the bureaucratic, financial and logistical odds that were against us.

The images in the mural consist mainly of individuals doing simple jobs, such as sewing or cutting hair. The goal of these images was to help encourage basic skills training amongst MDC students, as the Home is working to find suitable employment for many of the skilled students. While I found these images to be rather bland and uninspiring, and do not believe that so-called “avante” works contain no significance to mentally challenged people, I was pleasantly surprised to see how warm the reaction of the students were to the simple portrayals we created. They loved the fact that they understood what they saw, and to my somewhat naïve disappointment, I was unable to experiment with the idea that I could send subliminal messages of truth and empowerment through an overtly abstract and surreal mural painting.

ja.1n.us 2007