It was the second Instameet conducted Calcutta Instagrammers that I was attending on a dull grey March morning. The date was 6th of March 2016 and nearly six months back I had participated in my first Instameet. Things were quite different this time, unlike the first meet, this time, there were quite a few known faces and more than that there were many friends who I had acquired from the last Instameet.
This walk was organised on behalf of Turtle by Calcutta Instagrammers team and the theme for the day was “Graffiti” or you can say street art. The start point was Indian Museum and from there we will move to New Market and Sudder Street area which is slowly becoming a graffiti hub in this city.
Since I had previously extensively covered graffiti art in Kolkata through my blog and through Instagram thus I was quite excited to know more of these colourful walls across the city.
The walk was scheduled to start at 8 AM and more or less all the participants had gathered at the scheduled time. The walks started with the welcome address by Sammya one of the key founders Calcutta Instagrammers. The participants were divided into several groups with a designated group leader who would take them around the locality.
I was lucky that I was selected as one of the group leaders and together with my team I set out to see these wonderfully painted walks in my city. As mentioned earlier, I had done an extensive study of this locality thus decided to take my team directly to the lane which is unofficially known as “Graffiti Lane”. Even on Google maps this lane is marked as Graffiti Lane.
All the team members were new to this part of the city thus were completely mesmerised by the beautifully painted walls that cover both the sides in this small lane. Since this is more of a visual journey thus the rest of the blog will be a visual tribute to the graffiti artists who painstakingly cover the old walls giving it a new life.
There was some occasional drizzle in-between but these were never a show stopper and the walk continued until the end. The walk lasted around two hours and by 10.15 AM all the participants were back to the starting point. The walk was over but the work had just started, I had to rush back home and start processing the RAW photographs.
Thanks to Calcutta Instagrammers for organising such a wonderful photo walk and I wish to keep participating in more such walks in the future.