Painting For A Better Future – Pixncil

India has always been home to a collective culture with joint families going out of vogue only recently. The perks of being in a joint family are plenty for us humans because we are social animals and almost always need companions. However, with the changing times and with modernism creeping into our lives, many good things have happened alongside certain unwanted changes. This shift we see now in the structure of families moving from being a joint family to a nuclear family is the exclusion of the elderly. Just like children the elderly also need assistance from the dependable youth to go about their daily lives. Taking care of them comes as a part of our traditional culture and it is important to uphold such values now more than ever. 

Recognizing the need to raise awareness about this issue that is most often than not overlooked, a team of young yet wonderfully talented artists hailing from the city of Mangalore, who call themselves the Pinxcil have come together to do what they do best – graffiti and paint on walls in an attempt to create and increase public awareness and to divert social attention onto the fact that increasing number of senior citizens are being left to fend for themselves in a world where everybody is rushing through their lives. 

Recalling their journey, the members talked of how upon encountering an empty wall no ideas seemed to cross their mind but after having met its owner Mr. Chandrahas, who himself was an elderly man trying to fend for himself, the story struck a chord in their hearts and the team decided to dedicate their work towards this noble cause. Graffiti is a popular form of expressing art in places accessible to the common man on a daily basis and not just in museums and other art exhibitions. A team member by the name Vinod used the metaphor of a Banana peel that protects the fruit when it is tender but is soon discarded once the fruit no longer needs it. They titled their artwork as “It’s You Tomorrow.” Vinod talked passionately of how we as a society must condemn this behavior of disregarding the senior citizens of our nature. 

While they have worked on different places and with different themes, their next venture is at Urwa where they plan on depicting a woman who is a fishmonger. Evidently, Pinxil uses art to represent the ordinary people who are often overlooked but play a crucial role in society. The five members of Pinxil are Vinod, Pruthvi, Ajeesh, Abhijith, and Nitesh.