Sound of city festivities

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

"The original field recording was from Hotel Shadab, Hyderabad India. The recording was so humanly rich, with lots of voices, and activities which gave me an aural sense of a city in a busy day. Although I have never been to Hyderabad, the recording presented information about a generic day but of a particular time.
"So the recording inspired me in a way, that I wanted to illustrate my city, which is Kolkata sonically, but the time, the incidents which I tried to capture with my illustration were not generic, but of a particular period.
"For the past few months, the city has been ablaze regarding the protests for a horrific incident in RG Kar Hospital, and parallelly the biggest festival of the city, which is Durga Puja, was also coming in. There were two narratives of thought, floating around.
"The government was trying their best to push the term 'festival' in such a way that it directly opposed the term 'Protest', however, the people were hell-bent on the idea, that a protest against atrocities is a festival.
"I tried to capture this particular turbulent time of this city, and its gradual shifts during the Durga Puja festivities while parallelly drawing a line with all those familiar sounds with the protest and festivities.
"I have used the original recording from Hyderabad, in a way where it symbolizes the vocalization of the most mundane human beings, who become not so mundane when they gather in for a collective voice and the voices blend in. "
Hotel Shadab, Hyderabad reimagined by Prabuddha Mukhopadhyay.