The poster people of Mumbai.

For them, the world is an eyeball. And every wall that can take their size of communication is an asset. Religion holds no bar for them, neither does locality or status of residents. This army works mainly through the night when they can do their deed unhindered, unnoticed and slips away at the first peep of dawn.

No area is too far away, no wall, however already cluttered is to be spared. They work for ridiculous rates, involving only labor and the cost of gum they prepare of wheat and other things that are discarded. The pastes they prepare for gluing their posters is stronger and more resilient than most brands that claim such awesome powers of bonding and adhesiveness.

The question is, can they, who do this to make money for people who look to advertise for extremely CHEAP rates, be called vandals?

I think not.

The recent case of the wallproject (#wallproject on twitter) has had me raising eyebrows, not for anything other than the fact that these poster plasters are called vandals. Face it … they can’t afford hoardings, they can’t afford to buy or lease media. They way they see it, they’re just adding color to otherwise peeling, unmaintained facades that proliferate in Mumbai city.

For me, these posters are not the problem. Believe you me, there are areas in Mumbai, walls and facades, that would look really, really horrible without them.

But then, they chose to do it on the #wallproject.

So you, a busy tax payer have spent a day indulging in your painting skills, and demand compensation for this labor and all else going waste cuz someone slapped his poster on the space you painstakingly painted.  So what if its commercial in its own way? (I remember this amazing pict that said ‘absolut mumbai’ … isn’t that advtg too?)

Methinks the idea isn’t to punish this industry. The idea however, is to hold those to task that use up public property wantonly through this media, and pay nothing for it at all. The wall publicist, who is told “chaap do ye is shaher ke chappe chappe mein” is not to be blamed for his miniscule rate of Rs. 2 per poster sticking, but the production house is.

Grab ‘em, make ‘em pay Rs. 100 per poster per day even. And employ the poster pasters … the Govt would be doing a far, far better thing that it has ever done before.

For note, we can’t do without posters on some walls walls that our current municipalities and govts are too “poor” to notice or maintain.