The Kala Ghoda festival of Mumbai started on the 7th of February 2009 and will be on till the 15th of February 2009. The festival is organized by the Kala Ghoda Association who have been hosting this festival since 1999. Every year the Association works to bring people to this area to bring attention to the Kala Ghoda area with its concentration of museums, art galleries, educational institutions, boutiques and restaurant, and some of the finest of heritage buildings in the city.

These things have made this precinct emerge as an arts precinct and a prominent cultural centre, thronged by visitors and tourists from all over the world.The money raised through sponsorships during this festival is used to improve the area of Kala Ghoda and to renovate or restore the buildings in this area.

This is the first time that I have been to this festival in the five years that I have been staying in Mumbai and I can safely say that it was 4 hours well spent. Normally I wouldn’t be as enthused about vising art and culture festivals and such however, now-a-days I am just looking for an excuse to use my camera. This was a good opportunity and I made the most of it. Here is a short description of what I saw along with pictures of the area with the various exhibits and people.

We started our walk from the west side of the fair where there were a number of artists and other people selling their creations and wares on the pavements. There were paintings on paper which incorporated various transit tickets like bus tickets and train tickets into the painting, there were paintings on leaves and other such things. Somehow I felt that the theme this year was “Bicycles” as there were various displays incorporating the two wheeler in various ways and in various sizes. On the said pavements, there were people selling miniature bicycles made out of wire and other stuff made out of bicycle parts. However, the pavement area was mostly dedicated to paintings on non-standard surfaces. As mentioned before there were paintings on tickets, leaves, chairs, vanity cases, metal almirahs, boxes, tree bark, other sorts of wood and other such oddities. What caught my attention was a “Bar in a Box” which when opened had spaces to keep bottles and also places to hang your wine glasses.

The next section of the festival was made of an area for kids and childish adults to take part in various “educational” games and events and another section dedicated to what can only be described as a collection of installations by people who really don’t care about what people are going to think about their installations. Trying to find any semblence of meaning in the installation would only cause you to start mumbling and drooling like an idiot as more “artistic” people describe and have long debates about how a particular installation is the solution to the global warming problem. Hey don’t get me wrong, I liked most of the installations and took lots of pictures too, but if you ask me to tell you if the thing had any meaning, I don’t think so. They were good to look at and probably taste nice too.

For example, there was a big black sculpture of a scorpion with smaller silver scorpions on its back. Now does that have a deeper meaning, I don’t know, but it was well made. Hey, if I can tell what it is, vaguely, I like it. Then there was this mountain of enpty bottles, mugs, taps and other articles to do with water and its collection that signified the ever present problem faced in India of clean drinking water for everyone. I didn’t read the description (I generally don’t), I just guessed what it was. I was right. There was an enclosure of many coloured drapes that presented a nice photo opportunity, which I took up immediately. There was a metal spiral that people were photographing with fervour because they thought that it looked really cool (I guess they like things that go round and round). I didn’t like it that much cause it wasn’t placed in a way that would afford a good shot. Also, I didn’t get it, so I moved on. Around this section too there were people selling various pottery items and toys and handicrafts and the like. But the multi-coloured draped enclosure really stood out. I tried going inside for a photograph, but they said that I was too old! I said what the hell could they be seeing or doing that I haven’t already seen or done? Anyway the lady was adamant, so I let it be.

After this we moved to the section where all the noise wasa coming from. The amphitheatre area. Its a 150 metre stretch or road with steps on one side and a stage setup on the other side. The stage is about halfway down the road so before and after the stage there are stalls setup by various vendors hawking their wares. These range from antique looking house stuff to shoes to clothes and also trinkets that the foreigners and tourists are usually suckered into buying. Here too there are sculptures in metal and more sculptures made with bicycles and bicycle parts. When we arrived near the amphitheatre, a rock band had just finished and another percussion band was coming up in about 30 mins. So we stuck around and watched them play for some time. They started out well, with nice beats and stuff but ultimately degraded to the kind of drumming you have at Indian weddings, expecially the kind that accompanies the Baraat. So we left.