While the tram and the yellow taxi often find mention in reels and writings depicting quintessential Kolkata, not much thought is spared for the blue and yellow bus that effectively forms the backbone of public transport in the city.
An annual event that sees the confluence of art and heritage, called ‘The City as a Museum’, which is into its fifth edition this year, will celebrate this humble mode of transport by converting the bus into a mobile installation and parking it at the different sites that will be part of this festival, organised by art company DAG to be held on December 6-15.
“Unlike private cars that signify privilege, the bus embodies shared motion, connecting diverse bodies and neighbourhoods within a single, continuous movement across the city — it collapses distinctions between elite and subaltern spaces. Artists, conductors, workers, and passengers all contribute to its visual and social identity. The ‘vehicular art’ painted across its body is not just decoration but a mode of popular communication and resistance, where marginalised voices make themselves visible within the bourgeois urban order,” Maitrayee Paul, one of the DAG volunteers associated with the bus event titled ‘Dekho Magar Pyaar Se’ (see, but with affection), said.
