Asian Paints Reimagines Kolkata’s Yellow Taxi to Mark 40 Years of Sharad Shamman

Payal Paul, Kolkata : Durga Puja has long been Kolkata’s grandest stage — a festival where devotion merges seamlessly with design, where the sacred finds form in the contemporary. For forty years, Asian Paints Sharad Shamman has been the chronicler of this transformation, elevating Pujo beyond ritual into an act of imagination and artistry.

In its fortieth year, Asian Paints has chosen an emblem inseparable from the city’s memory — the yellow taxi — and turned it into a moving archive. The project, aptly named “Cholte Cholte 40,” sees forty taxis transformed into immersive cultural artefacts. Their exteriors bear the marks of time: painted motifs that reflect the changing language of Pujo, crowned with the Asian Paints emblem. Their interiors dissolve the boundaries between taxi and pandal, with wallpapers, fabrics, and textures from Asian Paints’ own collections — from Sabyasachi’s Paris–Calcutta series to Magnolia Home and Royale Glitz finishes — creating environments that feel both nostalgic and contemporary.

Each taxi encapsulates a decade. The late 1980s recall Sharad Shamman’s earliest years, when Pujo shifted decisively towards Sarbojonin celebration, accompanied by the iconic Gattu mascot and the hum of radio sets. The 1990s expand into theatre, illuminated by Chandannagar lights and animated by the cultural pulse of Bengali rock. The first decade of the millennium sees pandals rise into immersive spectacles, themes becoming larger than life under the patronage of sponsors. And the present moment, marked by projection mapping, concerts, and digital screens, retains its rootedness through Bengal’s enduring symbols — the owl, the tiger, the alpona traced on city pavements.

Unveiled in Kolkata in the presence of Amit Syngle, MD & CEO of Asian Paints, alongside actors Abir Chatterjee and Sauraseni Maitra, “Cholte Cholte 40” is at once an homage to Pujo’s creative evolution and to the taxi itself — once ubiquitous, now fading from the cityscape, yet deeply tied to its cultural fabric. For decades, these taxis ferried pandal-hopping families, artisans with clay and straw from Kumartuli, and Sharad Shamman juries through narrow para lanes. By turning them into art, Asian Paints restores them as custodians of the festival’s living archive.

This is not the company’s first experiment with reimagining Kolkata’s icons. In 2023, a tram bogie was transformed into a moving artwork to mark 150 years of the city’s tramways, its interiors glowing with cane craft, alpona, and Royale Glitz. With taxis, the journey shifts from rails to roads, carrying Pujo’s creative history once more through the arteries of the city.

“Cholte Cholte 40” is both a tribute and a statement: that creativity belongs not only in galleries or in carefully preserved archives but in the everyday rhythm of urban life. From its inaugural advertisement in 1985 to today’s yellow taxis, Asian Paints Sharad Shamman continues to affirm Kolkata as a city where tradition and imagination move together — always in motion, always alive.

ঐতিহ্যের পূজো, উদ্দীপনার উৎসব — A celebration of tradition, a festival of fervour.