Last week I joined a group walk to Shahpur Jat, an urban village in the heart of New Delhi. The village history dates back 900 years and all I had seen of it was the broken down structure of a wall– remnants of a historical past visible from the road I drove across so often.

What I witnessed as we walked into the narrow village streets however, was not what I had expected at all. There were no ancient structures here, there were no old houses bearing some story from the past but what I saw instead was an strange yet striking mix of traditional life with modern street art done recently as part of the street art festival in January.

Bright abstracts covered entire walls sharing space with glow signs of public banks, an image of a child with gun shots and eyes tearing into your soul stared out in another corner, a cat playing with a pink ball of yarn loomed over a house….the artists who came from different corners of the world left their mark on the streets here and Shahpur Jat, the urban village with an ancient history became part of another story in time.