Sudhir Patwardhan is our preeminent painter of people and the city. As a young idealist, he used the cracks in our post-independence optimism to imagine a socialist realignment that was inherently humane and socially desirable. Aligning with the labouring class, or the people, as he described them, he adopted an aesthetics of realism, and as a Mumbaikar, saw the city as the natural theatre in which life unfolded.