As of Wednesday, a new lavender-and-purple pattern stretches across the facade of Chennai’s Indira Nagar MRTS station.

Here, a peregrine falcon is depicted across one end. A Le Mans race car hurtles across another. At the centre is actor and racing driver Ajith Kumar, clad in gear, with  the word “Unstoppable” plastered across the surface.

For weeks, commuters travelling down Rajiv Gandhi Salai have watched the mural slowly take shape. Alongside excitement, there is nostalgia for the artwork that stood here before it.

Five years ago, the same wall carried a very different story. Featuring 10 monochrome photographic half-face smiling portraits of regular Chennai citizens, the mural carried a message to destigmatize HIV/AIDS. An initiative by St+art India Foundation and Tamil Nadu State Aids Control Society (TANSACS) along with Tidel Park and Southern Railway, the mural was an attempt to stop discrimination faced by people with HIV. This message was relayed subtly, without any words and Chennai-based graffiti writer and street artist A-Kill was commissioned to do the faces. 

The new mural is a tribute to actor and racing driver Ajith Kumar’s journey in motorsport. Commissioned as part of Campa Energy’s Unstoppable Energy campaign, in collaboration with Mark Metro and Mudra OOH, the work has been creatively directed and illustrated by Karthik SS, with Chennai-based street artist A-Kill painting Ajith Kumar’s portrait, Mumbai graffiti artist NME working on the Le Mans race car, and architect-muralist Ajith Kumar creating the peregrine falcon, all part of 108 Collective, a creative agency that does large scale murals.

It also carries messages urging motorists to wear seatbelts, follow traffic rules and drive responsibly. Yet, as fresh coats of paint cover one of Chennai’s most recognisable public artworks, the transformation has sparked a larger conversation — not just about a mural, but about the nature of public art and perception itself. 

While some welcome the new artwork, others have questioned the loss of a mural that had become woven into the city’s visual identity. For Karthik, who leads the project, the debate is as much about impermanence as it is about art. “The intention is to keep the conversation going. Today this is the conversation. After eight months or a year, it will be about something else. The idea is to keep changing the conversation,” he says.

“Without understanding the whole process, the reaction becomes very superficial. There is an economy behind a wall like this. To paint a wall of this scale, there is the cost of maintaining it, the paint, the equipment, the manpower and the permissions. Just preparing the wall costs lakhs. The idea is to work with brands, but create something that people can engage with rather than simply putting up an advertisement,” he says.

Karthik argues that the debate often overlooks the realities of creating and maintaining large-scale public art. According to him, preparing the 63,000 sq ft wall alone cost over ₹10 lakh, while the project currently employs 26 people, including 18 trained artists and several younger muralists being mentored through the collective.

Yet, for many Chennai residents, the debate is not about the quality of the new mural or the intentions behind it, but about the disappearance of a work that had become woven into the city’s everyday landscape. Murals, unlike monuments, are rarely built to last forever. They fade, weather and, eventually, give way to new stories. The HIV/AIDS mural stood on the Indira Nagar MRTS facade for five years before making way for a new conversation.

Whether this new artwork will earn the same place in the city’s collective memory remains to be seen. But the reaction to its arrival has revealed something perhaps more significant: that Chennai has grown attached to its public art.