Shabbu, a painter by profession, lives in Batla House. He pursued his Masters in Fine Arts from Jamia Milia Islamia. Soft-spoken, not particularly brave, but upright, Shabbu started his career in Mumbai, painting life-size movie posters. Realising he had some talent to hone, he came back to Delhi and funded four years of college by painting fresh fruit juice stalls across the city. Work, he speaks of with pride.

Now imagine Shabbu painting an urdu couplet on a wall of a nondescript government building in north-east Delhi. Let the fact that he was commissioned by the Delhi government be damned. What would appear to some of us cynics as a recipe for a mini-Hindutva uprising, was unthinkable for the street artist named Akhalq Ahmad.