Home is where the heart is, they say. But when we asked designer Nida Mahmood about where her heart really lies, she promptly said it was her studio. Spending most of her day in her cozy, kitschy and welcoming studio at Shahpurjat, Nida Mahmood has spent a lot of energy in doing up her studio and was happy to invite us in. True to her loud, Bollywood inspired, pop-artish aesthetic you don’t mistake even for once the place as you enter. The gallery is pasted with old newspapers and Retro religious posters along with signboards that greet you with the dialogues from quintessential Bollywood capers Sholay and Don.
As we spot the unmistakable mask replicas from her last collection for spring-summer, peppered with hand-made sketches of the same, we make ourselves comfortable on leather chairs with Amitabh Bachchan painted over a yellow background, that seems all too familiar, but escapes our memory entirely. “These chairs that you are sitting on are antique leather chairs from the front row seats of an old cinema hall. We got them redone for the studio,” informs Nida in a quiet, but unmistakable voice. As we moved our eyes over the dirty green walls of the tubelit space that firmly established Amitabh Bachchan from his Coolie days and Anil Kapoor of the jhakkas yore were certainly the favourites. They were on postcards, trunks, coasters, clocks, and anywhere your eyes would go. “I meet a lot of wonderfully talented people in my line of work and it’s not difficult to get these things made. And since I do end up spending so much time in here and enjoy every bit of it, then it certainly must reflect in the surroundings,” she tells us, pointing to a papier mache dustbin and a matching soft board, which she got custom-made a few years ago.
Using the space to paint and design we could see a lot of her work at the space. Like a painting in progress she was working on for the upcoming Holi Cow festival. “I love painting and take out days when I can just sit and do just that,” she tells us.