Mapping our mills

We are living in a time when physical maps are starting to lose all practical use. All we have to do is flip out our phone and log on to an online one to find our way. There is even a theory that sometime in the future, a hologram will emanate from our phones when we are searching for a location, placing us virtually in the middle of the place we want to be. That day is still far away, of course. But the point remains that paper maps are almost out of the window. And that's why the effort that Simran Arora has taken to create a black-and-white one that depicts the mills of Byculla is such a wonderful idea.

The seeds of the project were sown when the 24-year-old was still studying architecture at a city college. Arora chose to study the mill areas of the city since her undergraduate thesis was based on the industrial history of Mumbai. And once she had submitted it, she thought to herself, "Why not start a blog where I sketch the areas I have been to?"