Two months ago I reached out to Meenal Baghel, the editor of Hindustan Times, Mumbai with a request to feature/review my new book - AFTERLIFE. She proposed a better idea instead. That I write about why and how I made the book. Initially it seemed a bit vain, but once I got down to writing, I realized it was a fantastic exercise in talking about work that spans twenty two years in a tight block of eight hundred words. Here is the piece and the accompanying images - 

 

My first sighting of an upcycled chamcha hoarding was in 2004. At first, I neither understood it nor made much of it. To use photojournalist lingo, it was just an offbeat image that plugged a holes in the city page – miles away from being a project, a body of work or even a series, let alone a book. But those severed heads and lopsided smiles wouldn’t leave my eyes alone. The damn things kept showing up and, as a compulsive photographer, I diligently photographed them. Unbeknownst to me, I had built a reputation. A balding yet pony tailed photojournalist quipped – ghar se office aaney ke raaste mein jo bhi banner dikhta hai bhai uska photo marta hai! 

 

In 2016, I came across a truckful being installed and I tried befriending the boys. They looked at me with severe suspicion, unwillingly entertained my questions every few minutes they were on land but they wanted me gone as I was slowing them down in the small hours. Next day, armed with 5Ws and H, I went to their workshop. Welcomed by acrid fumes that made me woozy, the man manning it was flummoxed yet amused. 

 

I understood their business model – the economics of production, the nocturnal choreography of installation and removal, and the final act of repurposing and I was convinced that no matter what the law is, these rotten flowers that desecrate our city aren’t going anywhere, anytime soon! Aided today by AI generated designs and snapchat-level attention spans, they have only gotten bigger and uglier. I don’t think I have seen Mumbai as ugly as it was on the August 15, 2026. In Oshiwara, it felt as if there existed a hoarding for every resident of the suburb. 

 

As a photographer, I am drawn to self-publishing for two reasons – mainstream publishers are lily-livered to back obscure, offbeat ideas and a book is the best outlet for a photographer’s voice as it also aids its evolution. As with everyone else, the imposed silence of 2020 made me rethink my life. I deployed the isolation and my need to grow and handmade many dummies at home. One of them was Afterlife, the working title for my growing pile of images of re-purposed chamcha hoardings. In 2022, I had my first solo show at Cymroza and a peculiar word on the wall text by the curator Ranjit Hoskote piqued my curiosity. Ozymandias -- I kept reading it over and over again and marvelled at how acutely it described the trajectory and final outcome of the megalomania that afflicts our politicians and their cronies. 

 

We live in sycophantic times indeed!

 

All the old dummies went out the window and a new one was constructed, clad using a banner I had knifed from the street. White space and any amount of respect for my own images were erased to pave the way for chaos and fragmentation. Printed on glossy paper often used for party manifestos, just the way the hoardings sit cheek to cheek on our streets, every photograph begins where the preceding one ends. The flip of the page, now resembling a slow painful ride through Western Express Highway on a Monday morning, stuck, staring at greed-tinged faces of the very people responsible for the plunder of our city. 

 

As the pictures roll over, the bleed swallows portions of it. New, chaotic images and spreads are born that mirror the distressed yet somewhat useful afterlives of the images on the posters them-selves. Sacrilege, felt a German art photographer while a Mancunian professor embraced the fractures. Saddled between these two reactions the poem too is pulled apart, a word on each page, acting as a visual guide or simply a playful thing to connect as you turn the pages. As Ozymandias collabs with Theseus in Afterlife, I get that it is ironic to give permanence to something whose life goal is to disappear. By making this book, I suppose I am being my own chamcha, asking people to look, pay attention and, eventually, buy an object that you can also rest your coffee or beer mug on! 

 

After delays caused by LPG induced labour shortages, unusual hikes in ink and paper prices and being ghosted by seven printers, the book finally hit the press. Nervous and excited the printer had a pertinent question, “ye kitab kiske liye hai?” 

 

I have grown up looking at romanticised and often escapist renditions of Bombay, now Mumbai. While beauty must indeed be celebrated, we owe it to the future to record acts of defacement, plunder and destruction. To remind us of all that we lost and now stand to lose. To answer my printer, the book is for anyone and everyone who lives and works in the city, but especially those who have mistaken public space for private property and visibility for public service. 

 

You are already surveilling our meals, our movements, our money, our conversations, that is if we make it in time after surviving potholes, falling bridges and back-breaking traffic. Every tiny visit, every tiny public service, every tiny festival is an excuse to litter the landscape and cause inconvenience. 

 

For mere transient visibility. 

 

Is this really the best you can do?