: Blue Zebras to Purple Strawberries: Journalist Showcases Quirky Art of Mumbai Cabs #IndiaNEWS When you open the Greater Bombay’s Instagram account, you are greeted with bizarre designs that Rachel

Blue Zebras to Purple Strawberries: Journalist Showcases Quirky Art of Mumbai Cabs #IndiaNEWS
When you open the Greater Bombay’s Instagram account, you are greeted with bizarre designs that Rachel Lopez equates to French knots, vintage photo albums, funky animal print, ‘picnics in the sky’ and even inspirations from the ‘Illuminati’.
A closer look and you’ll notice that this unique collection of photographs captures a tiny portion of Mumbai’s essence — the inside of the city’s taxi cabs.
Big floral motifs to tiny chequered prints in bright colours and designs that resemble ‘grandma’s night dress’ — all found on the ceilings of these cabs.
Speaking to The Better India, the Mumbai-based journalist, says, “I didn’t intend to make a collection. I was simply getting into a taxi to get to work one day in 2017. I got into a kaali peeli cab, like I always do, and that’s when I noticed the ceiling of the cab was hideous but beautiful at the same time. It had a chocolate brown background with strawberries of unnatural colours like purple and green — in the way they don’t appear in nature. �?
The “ghastly but fun�? design made her take a picture of it.

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“I thought, ‘I wonder how many taxis and how many pictures I can take before I see all the designs there are’. Here I am 550 pictures later, and I haven’t captured the same design twice,�? says Rachel.
She adds, “I move around the city a lot and I love the quirkiness of all of us jammed up together, living peacefully, for the most part. And all of those pictures represent a ride that I have taken in Mumbai. �?
The inspiration for her Instagram handle, Greater Bombay, stems from this sentiment exactly.
When she shows people these pictures, some know right away what they’re looking at while others still wonder why they’re looking at pictures of her forehead (which gets captured by her front camera).
Today, Rachel’s fascination for the ceilings of Mumbai cabs is resonated by her 11,500 followers.

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“It has given me such a wonderful way of looking at my city,�? she asserts.
Her journey of capturing the ceilings of cabs have often resulted in the most amusing anecdotes — from asking a perplexed cab driver for water to wipe the grubby ceiling to using a MAC cleansing wipe, coveted by many, to do the same.
“Sometimes I chat up the cab driver about how beautiful their taxi is and all I get is a grunt.