Journal Entry 1: Kala Ghoda Arts Festival

By Jyotsna Shenoy🎆💓

The present day of February✨🕒

In the month of February, at this time of the year if I were in Goa I would probably be penning my thoughts about the Carnival or the International Film Festival or maybe the Serendipity Arts Festival. Here I’m in Mumbai and when I look upto the ‘Things to do in Mumbai’ on the search engine, if there is something that can boost my creative juices, it’s got to be the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. I can’t get away without comparing all of the Goan cultural festivals to this one, but having said that Kala Ghoda does have its own uniqueness which makes it stand out in many ways. Heres a heads up to what this event is actually about!

 

Intro 🎈🎨🎭🎪

Kala Ghoda is an art district in the Downtown Mumbai. It has a large number of city’s heritages and is a hip, creative area with museums, art galleries and designer cafés. The name Kala Ghoda means Black Horse, a reference to the presence of a black stone statue of King Edward VII (as the then Prince of Wales) mounted on a horse that was built by Jewish businessman and philanthropist Albert Abdullah David Sassoon.

The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival is a multicultural event held every year in the month of February in a view to maintain and preserve the rich heritage and crafts of the area of South Mumbai.

About this year 🎉🎋🎏

The fest usually runs for about a week, and this year it was from 3rd February to 11th February. The Festival theme for the year 2018 in particular was ‘Hara Ghoda’ meaning Green Horse in a nod to sustainable living, recycling and environmental- friendliness which brought on the stage the wonders of nature through performance and art. The indestructible earth in the realms of space finds it’s place in the representation of the same!

An excerpt from my personal experience! ✨🙌

Day 1: (My first ever visit, on the last day of this year😂) On the last day of this festival on a pleasant Sunday morning, I find myself in a very packed crowded area of Kala Ghoda, which was very much anticipated how much ever intimidating it was, but it was worth the hype that it gets every year and I’m glad I finally made it to this! The massive art installations were what won me over! Apart from that there were a few literature events, painting workshops, artistic displays all over the streets and the little studio potter’s market at a backside of the street which was relatively less crowded. A heritage bus tour was a perfect ending for the day as it looks us all the way along the stretch of the Colaba causeway into various heritage centres and the ancient history of that area.

Illustrations speak volumes for themselves and an article in this genre cannot be complete without the same. All of my above words can be converted into a much better form in terms of these captures below, so brace yourselves! Words are underrated often as too say, but however cliché it might sound, this is an experience of a lifetime and I would love to live it again, sometime next year! ^_^