Anaheeta Pinto

Anaheeta Pinto is a brand and communications consultant with over 18 years of experience. She is a long-term resident of Richards Town and member of The Richards Town Residents Association (RTRA). 

Richards Town is tucked away to the north of Bangalore’s Cantonment area and is anchored at its centre by Richards Park, one of the city’s oldest surviving parks. Wide tree-lined avenues with broad footpaths fan out in a grid pattern on all four sides of the park, giving the area its distinctly “old Bangalore” feel. The locality continues to be home to a heterogeneous community of Christians, Hindus and Muslims, who have lived alongside each other since the Town’s inception. The Town’s borders are porous because of busy link roads to its East, West and South. The Telugu Mizpah Church and Holy Ghost Church in Richards Town draw their Telugu, Kannada and Tamil speaking congregations from as far as Lingarajapuram and Banaswadi.  Muslims in Richards Town pray at the Sir Ismail Sait Mosque located in the adjacent Fraser Town, and Richards Park itself is used by residents from adjacent neighbourhoods. 

The RTRA was formed in 1998 by a group of long-term residents to work for the welfare of its residents. Given how diverse the resident population is, RTRA’s central concern is to increase communication between residents, to better understand who they are as a community and what they want for their future. In their proposal, Anaheeta notes that the diligent work of 55 BBMP Pourakarmikas underpins their lives in Richards Town. Children of the Pourakarmikas and children of residents of the locality play on the same roads. 

Anaheeta and RTRA now seek to organise an interaction between these children, through an artistic engagement that explores the Town’s park and their neighhourhood. Led by resident and popular artist Paul Fernandes and a local design firm Icarus, children will be invited to explore the environs around Richards Park and their connections to it. Over three days, they will be encouraged to explore ideas, images, and sounds seeking inspiration for their artworks. Originally, Richards Park was identified as a possible venue to display the artwork. However, now they propose to use the walls along the railway track on Pottery Road as a canvas for the children’s artwork. This way they can also engage with Clarence School that shares a wall with the one chosen for this project.  The outcome of this grant will be the three-day art intervention. The grantee’s deliverables to IFA will be photo-documentation of the intervention and digital copies of the artworks.

This project is made possible with support from India Foundation for the Arts, under the Project 560 programme and partnered by Citi India.