Chal Rang De Asalpha: Welcome to the ‘Positano’ of Mumbai

From drab to dramatic, that’s pretty much how one can describe the transformation of Asalpha village in Ghatkopar, Mumbai. Dedeepya Reddy, founder Chal Rang De and the woman who decided to beautify Mumbai’s slums wanted to change the way people look at slums in India and therefore decided to turn them into a work of art.

The Chal Rang De team with the help of 750 volunteers has painted 170 walls and created 17 murals. While anyone with a paint brush could help in the first phase that involved painting the walls, Dedeepya reached out to professional mural artists for the second phase, where artists from all over the country contributed to making someone else’s living space more evocative. Every piece of art on these walls is either a reflection of the slum dwellers or a message to them.

“ If you walk through this place, you just see that it’s really inclusive and it’s really intimate, like you get out of your own house and you’re into someone else’s. Adding aesthetics, adding colours, adding vibrance, adding just the environment and emotion out here is something, that I as an artist loved to do.”

Shrujan Shah, volunteer and artist 

The journey has just started for Dedeepya and her team. They plan to cover the entire city and add more colour and happiness to the lives of every person living in the slums of Mumbai. They don’t want to just transform their homes, they also want to empower these people.

“We want to promote this place as a must-visit place when you’re here in Bombay. We’re creating curated tours for people, we are going to be training the local boys to take people around so they also make more money out of this.”

Dedeepya Reddy, Founder Chal Rang De

Camera: Sanjoy Deb
Edit: Veeru Krishan Mohan

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