I am not surprised that image-searching ‘mumbai logo’ on Google fetches more of the Mumbai Indians cricket team logo and hardly any of the official Mumbai logo that the city’s municipality released three months ago. This logo was originally intended to brand Mumbai in the same way ‘I
The Mumbai logo fails my own test of insignia popularity: If I can’t draw a rough sketch of it on paper, if I can’t make it my own, I wouldn’t care about it.
Fridge magnets, the most enduringly universal tourist takeaways of all time, say a lot about the way a city or a nation thinks of itself, and how well tourists embrace those ideas. It is much easier for a foreigner to connect with an embossed sketch of the Eiffel Tower or the Notre Dame cathedral on a magnet rather than it would be with a logo that is a cocktail of exalted ideals commissioned by the Council of Paris. Or imagine the results had the Mayor of NYC rejected Milton Glaser’s ‘I
Most international cities have recurring themes drawn from popular culture or architectural icons on their fridge magnets. For example, NYC could equally well we known by either of the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge or the Statue of Liberty. Amsterdam has its windmills, weed, canals and wooden shoes. In comparison, Mumbai has under-utilised its own symbols to market itself. Here is a list of things that could have instead been employed in the Mumbai logo, and can well be used on Mumbai memorabilia.
1. The BEST bus and local train – If millions across the world can remember London by its red double-decker buses and ‘Mind the Gap’ signage on its tube, Mumbai’s buses are equally peculiar and its suburban railway signage as memorable.
2. The Mumbai traffic cop – the paunch, the white shirt and black-yellow cap are more ubiquitous in Mumbai than the Queen’s Guards in London.
3. Gateway of India, Rajabhai Tower, Bombay Stock Exchange, Mumbai CST Railway Station.
4. Bhel Puri, Vada Pav and other Street Food carts or the Dabbawallah.
5. The white-capital-letters on dark-indigo background street signage.