Crafting art from Delhi's discards

An installation made from objects recovered from landfills.

- NIROJ SATPATHY

Niroj Satpathy’s story sounds like the plot of a Ritwik Ghatak film: a caste iconoclast, indifferent to class status, is driven to lift the veil off things that society generally keeps hidden.

“Tve seen Delhi at all times of day and night. When I first came to the city in 2012, after completing an MFA (Masters in Fine Arts) in Odisha, I spent six months taking buses around the city,” says the 41-year-old.

He found a job with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), as a conservator in Lal Qila. After a year and a half, when the project he was working on ended, he was at a loose end again. He returned home to Odisha, where a meeting with a stranger at a restaurant got him his next gig, as a night supervisor ina private company hired by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's solid waste management department.