Brands
Asian Paints, St+art turn Ballygunge into Kolkata’s living art district
KOLKATA: Asian Paints, in partnership with the St+art India Foundation, has unveiled St+art Kolkata Festival 2025–26, transforming Ballygunge into a canvas for public art, conversation and everyday creativity through a city-scale initiative titled ADDA: the third space.
Rooted in Kolkata’s long-standing adda and rowak culture, the festival reimagines public spaces as shared “third spaces”: neither home nor street alone, but places of connection, pause and belonging. The project unfolds through a series of outdoor art interventions across south Kolkata, alongside an indoor exhibition at TRI Art & Culture Centre.
At the heart of the festival is the Colour Corridor, an immersive passageway created by Sayan Mukherjee and inspired by Asian Paints’ Chromacosm. Designed as a sensorial welcome zone, it wraps visitors in colour, light and movement, inviting them to slow down and experience art as part of daily life. A specially written Bengali poem, voiced in the accompanying film, adds a lyrical tribute to the city’s pulse, while a typographic façade by street artist Khatra and augmented reality elements extend the experience across TRI’s premises.
Inside TRI Art & Culture Centre, an exhibition featuring works by ten artists blurs the boundary between private and public life. Familiar domestic spaces are reimagined: a bed becomes a gathering spot, a kitchen evokes memory through scent: using colour, texture, sound and smell to explore how connection and belonging are shaped in contemporary cities.
The Ballygunge project builds on Asian Paints’ long-running collaboration with St+art India Foundation, guided by the ethos of Art For All. Previous public art districts in Lodhi, Mahim and other neighbourhoods have similarly sought to pull art out of galleries and into the street, turning overlooked corners into places for collective experience.
“Kolkata has always expressed itself through art, colour and conversation,” said Asian Paints managing director and chief executive Amit Syngle. “With St+art Kolkata and ADDA: the third space, we are bringing art directly into neighbourhood life, showing how colour can shape emotion, memory and belonging.”
St+art India Foundation co-founder and chief curator Giulia Ambrogi, said the festival aimed to make art an everyday encounter rather than a spectacle, reflecting the city’s collective spirit and culture of dialogue.
Running across Ballygunge until January 15, St+art Kolkata 2025–26 invites residents to rediscover their city through tactile installations, poetic murals and shared spaces.
Brands
Dunkin’ Donuts to exit India as Jubilant FoodWorks ends 15-year franchise deal
The quick service restaurant giant is ending a 15-year franchise partnership with the American doughnut chain, even as it renews its Domino’s agreement for another 15 years
NOIDA: Dunkin’ is done in India. Jubilant FoodWorks Ltd, the country’s leading quick service restaurant operator, has decided not to renew its franchise agreement with the American coffee and doughnut chain, and will wind down its Indian stores in a phased manner before December 31, 2026, bringing a 15-year partnership to a quiet, loss-laden close.
The decision, approved by JFL’s board on March 30, 2026, ends a relationship that began with a Multiple Unit Development Franchise Agreement signed on February 24, 2011. JFL will now evaluate and undertake what it described in a regulatory filing as the “rationalisation and/or cessation of certain operations and/or sale, transfer or disposal of assets and/or assignment or transfer of franchise rights,” all in consultation with Dunkin’s brand owners and strictly within the terms of the original agreement.
The numbers tell the story bluntly. In the financial year 2024-25, Dunkin’ India posted a revenue of Rs 37 crore against a loss of Rs 19 crore — a haemorrhage that was always going to test the patience of a parent company recording revenues of Rs 6,104 crore and a profit of Rs 194 crore in the same period. Doughnuts, it turns out, were never going to move the needle.
The contrast with JFL’s handling of its other marquee franchise could hardly be sharper. Even as it walks away from Dunkin’, the company has just doubled down on Domino’s, signing a fresh Master Franchise Agreement on March 31, 2026, granting it exclusive rights to develop and operate Domino’s Pizza stores in India for 15 years, with an option to renew for a further 10.
JFL, incorporated in 1995 and promoted by the Bharatia family, operates a network of more than 3,500 stores across six markets — India, Turkey, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Its portfolio includes Domino’s and Popeyes on the global side, and two home-grown brands: Hong’s Kitchen and COFFY, a café brand in Turkey.
For Dunkin’, India was always a stretch. The brand never quite cracked the cultural code in a market where filter coffee and chai command fierce loyalty and where the doughnut remains, at best, an occasional indulgence rather than a daily habit. Fifteen years, mounting losses and a parent with better things to spend its capital on was always going to be a difficult equation to solve.
The doughnut has had its last day. The pizza, however, is staying.
