Asian Paints Cholte Cholte 40 – A Royale Tribute to Kolkata
Kolkata, September 10, 2025: Asian Paints Sharad Shamman, Kolkata’s most iconic celebration of Durga Pujo creativity, completes 40 years in 2025with a landmark project called “Cholte Cholte 40” that transforms Kolkata’s yellow taxis into moving time capsules. With richly painted exteriors and interiors crafted as immersive environments using wallpapers, fabrics, and textures, each taxi becomes a multisensory portal into its decade, crowned by the Asian Paints crown as a symbol of elevating the everyday. Together, these taxis carry four decades of Asian Paints Sharad Shamman’ cultural archive back into the streets of Kolkata, reaffirming its motto: A celebration of tradition, a festival of fervour.
This unique tribute to Kolkata was unveiled in the presence of Amit Syngle, MD and CEO of Asian Paints Ltd., and acclaimed West Bengal personalities Abir Chatterjee and Sauraseni Maitra.
Asian Paints Sharad Shamman was instituted in 1985 with a newspaper advertisement that redefined how the city viewed its festival. For the first time, Pujo was recognised as an act of creativity and design, not only devotion. The inaugural edition honoured three committees with the Best Puja award, and over the years Asian Paints Sharad Shamman expanded its categories to mirror the festival’s growth: Best Puja (Shrestho Pujo), Discovery of the Year (Bochorer Bismoy), and Best Artisan (Shrestho Protimashilpi). In doing so, Asian Paints Sharad Shamman has built a four-decade archive that charts Pujo’s transformation.
To mark these four decades, Asian Paints turned to another Kolkata emblem — the yellow taxi — a vehicle that has been inseparable from the city’s Pujo journeys yet is now slowly disappearing from its streets. For decades, these taxis ferried entire families on pandal-hopping trails, transported artisans with straw and clay from Kumartuli, and carried Asian Paints Sharad Shamman judges through crowded para lanes. Reimagining them as art was both homage and reinvention: forty taxis, each representing a decade of the awards, were transformed into travelling archives. Inside the taxis, the intimacy of the pandal is recreated: curtains and wallpapers from the Asian Paints Royale range, under-seat lights, UV accents, reflective finishes of Royale Glitz. Outside, the yellow remains visible, layered with each decade’s motifs and crowned with the “Crown of Pujo” — a quiet nod to both Asian Paints Sharad Shamman’s prestige and to Asian Paints’ own high-sheen legacy.
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