Apple’s Mumbai 50th Mural Was Drawn by Mira Malhotra

Apple BKC unveiled a Mira Felicia Malhotra mural on March 28, 2026, the India stop on the company’s 50th-anniversary tour. She drew the arch on iPad Pro with Apple Pencil Pro in Procreate, then Apple printed it across the glass of its first Indian store.

The birthday was Apple’s. The drawing, the software, and the three-year hiring trail belonged to other people, and they did the work that customers now walk under.

Mira Malhotra Put Apple’s Birthday on the Glass

Malhotra is a Mumbai visual artist and illustrator known for bold, multicoloured portraits of Indian women. Apple asked her to put community on the storefront, and she built an arch over the store’s glass entryway as a group portrait of young Indians in a shared moment.

The piece mixes a high-five with older public rituals. She put mallakhamb, the pole-and-rope sport, next to Janmashtami, and she put a girl braiding another girl’s hair in as a childhood marker. After the unveiling she ran a Today at Apple session on how the file became a mural, then sat with singer-songwriter Anuv Jain to talk about sound and pictures.

WHAT SHE PUT ON THE ARCH

• The brief: Apple’s team asked her to highlight community, which she said already sits at the centre of her work.
• The youth layer: People exchanging high-fives, drawn as a present-tense Mumbai gesture.
• The festival layer: Janmashtami unfolding beside mallakhamb, two public forms that still fill Indian streets.
• The private layer: A girl braiding another girl’s hair, which she called a marker of childhood and of how young people relate to one another.

She trained with a BFA in Illustration at Mumbai University and a Master’s in Graphic Design at the National Institute of Design. She is a founding member of Kadak, a global collective of South Asian women graphic artists, and she runs Studio Kohl, which works on identity, gender, and mental health. That is a heavier practice than “playful,” the word Apple used in its own caption.

When you’re working with a Procreate file of this size and dimension, you tend to lose layers. I was struggling with layers towards the end, but I had a great deal of fun.

Mira Felicia Malhotra, visual artist, at Apple BKC

She does not use AI to draw. “My illustration work doesn’t involve AI because it’s simply too enjoyable to do it myself,” she said. “You take on a project because you enjoy the process, why remove that joy by using AI?”

Three Years of Casting Before the Party

Apple did not discover Malhotra for a birthday. In February 2023, two months before India had an Apple Store, the company put her in a Digital Artists in Residence program at the India Art Fair with Varun Desai and Gaurav Ogale, and showed family portraits titled Log Kya Kahenge, “What Will People Say?”

Each portrait had a polite front. An animated second layer, viewed through the Artivive app on iPad or iPhone, showed the family Apple’s cameras were not supposed to see. She sketched in Procreate, shot subjects on iPhone 14, and sent PSD files into Photoshop. “With iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, it’s the pen and paper, the brush and canvas, all in one,” she said then.

Bob Borchers, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing at the time, called India “a vibrant creative community” and pointed at those three artists as proof of what iPad Pro could do. The 2026 mural is that pitch, scaled to the door of the store Tim Cook opened in Bandra Kurla Complex on April 18, 2023.

She still talks about the first small iPad as the machine that let her find a style, because she hates wasting paper and because Undo is a kind of mercy traditional media will not give. The 50th job was the same pipeline under a larger clock: sketch on iPad Pro, refine on a Mac, grab early ideas on an iPhone, then print the file several feet high on corporate glass.

The Drawing App on the Storefront Is Tasmanian

Procreate is not an Apple app. It is made by the Tasmanian company Savage Interactive, and it is the program that actually put colour on Apple’s 50th in more than one city. In Mumbai it made the BKC arch. In Sydney it made the moving stills on the Opera House. In Shanghai, designer Feng Chen Wang lists it with iPad, Mac, and iPhone as a core tool.

Apple’s own newsroom, describing the Sydney show Illuminating Creativity, called Procreate a drawing and animation app developed in Tasmania and a multiple Apple Design Awards winner. The Opera House, launching a yearlong tie-up with Apple, let Procreate CEO James Cuda speak in his own words.

Procreate was born from the belief that multitouch and Apple Pencil could transform the experience of creating digital art. Fifteen years later, this initiative with Apple and the Sydney Opera House underscores our shared commitment to making powerful creative tools accessible to everyone, from beginners to professional artists.

James Cuda, CEO, Procreate, Sydney Opera House announcement

Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, folded that Australian tool into the 50th script, talking about “the transformative power of iPad and Procreate.” Tim Cook then posted video of the sails and tagged the app. Procreate’s account answered in public.

We’re extremely honoured 🎉 https://t.co/ZnW0bgGtku

— Procreate (@Procreate) March 25, 2026

The same week, Procreate’s public feed was full of a plainer problem: the app stores canvases on the iPad unless the artist exports them, and a deleted copy is gone. Malhotra’s layer struggle at mural scale is the professional version of that limit. Apple got a storefront. She was inside a file that started dropping layers when it grew to the size of a door.

What Other Cities Got for the Same Birthday

Apple’s newsroom listed 14 stops. New York opened on March 13 with 17-time Grammy winner Alicia Keys on the steps of Apple Grand Central. Paul McCartney closed the tour at Apple Park on March 31, the night before the official date of April 1, 1976 plus 50 years. Mumbai, between those poles, got a local mural and a talk, not a stadium act.

HOW THE 50TH TOUR WAS CAST

Tokyo, Bangkok, Seoul, Vancouver, Mexico City, and Chengdu filled the other six slots, with Mori Calliope, Molly Yllom’s Crybaby, K-pop group CORTIS, skater Elladj Baldé, the Apple TV rooms behind Las Azules and Acapulco, and Chris Lee. Each city supplied a living local name. Apple supplied the room, the kit, and the anniversary hashtag.

On April 1 Cook posted a rewind and thanked “our teams, our users, and everyone who’s been part of the journey.” The replies that stuck were jokes about old Macs and a reversed video, a nostalgia register the live tour had already left behind. The hired artists were the point of March. The commenters wanted 1984 back.

50 years of Apple, 50 years of innovation.

Thank you to our teams, our users, and everyone who’s been part of the journey. #Apple50 pic.twitter.com/YYkMN24Vzc

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) April 1, 2026

In a letter posted on Apple’s site, Cook wrote that the company was founded on the idea that technology should be personal, and that “the most meaningful chapters are written by all of you.” The Mumbai chapter is literally that sentence, printed as someone else’s drawing.

India’s First Store Is Now One of Six

The mural hangs on a store that is no longer Apple’s only Indian address. Thirty days before the unveiling, Apple opened Apple Borivali in Sky City Mall, its second Mumbai shop and its sixth in the country, at 1 p.m. IST on February 26, 2026, with more than 70 staff.

APPLE’S INDIA STORE ROLL

1. April 18, 2023: Apple BKC opens at Jio World Drive, the first company-run store in India.
2. 2023: Apple Saket opens in Delhi in the same first wave.
3. 2023 to 2025: Apple Hebbal in Bengaluru and Apple Koregaon Park in Pune follow.
4. 2025: Apple Noida joins the map.
5. February 26, 2026: Apple Borivali opens, taking the count to six.

Deirdre O’Brien, Apple’s senior vice president of Retail and People, said the Borivali team was “inspired by the creativity and enthusiasm of communities across India.” BKC still does the ceremonial work. It is the store with the glass arch, the Today at Apple stage, and the celebrity drop-ins. Borivali is the suburban machine for pickups, repairs, and weekday classes.

That split is the retail logic under the mural. The first store, in a business district, wears the artist. The sixth store, in a northern mall, sells the phones. Both run Today at Apple. Only one got the 50th picture.

Anuv Jain Came Ready to Defend Human Work

Jain’s job that Saturday was to sit with Malhotra and talk about how sound pushes a picture. He used the microphone for a harder claim. He still wants art made by people, even when the tools are excellent, and he reached for a film stunt to say it.

In Mission Impossible, we know Tom Cruise does most of his own stunts. It makes you feel more attached to the films because of the thrill the actor brings. It is the same for other art forms. If there is a machine behind it, you can still enjoy the music, but if there are human-generated elements, it matters much more. I still think we want something that is made by humans.

Anuv Jain, singer-songwriter, at Apple BKC, March 28, 2026

Actor Rohit Saraf, also in the room, told a smaller story that Apple has been using for 50 years: his late father’s iPod still works after more than two decades. In Tokyo, Mori Calliope told Apple Music’s DJ Mino that her own music life started by putting songs on an iPod nano. The old player is still the prop that makes the anniversary feel like a life, not a product cycle.

Cook, in the March 12 letter that opened the month, toasted “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers.” Malhotra’s refusal to let a model draw for her, and Jain’s Tom Cruise analogy, are the only lines from Mumbai that sound like that toast. The arch over the door is a hand-drawn Procreate file, scaled until the layers started to fail, then printed on the first Apple Store in India.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where Is Apple BKC, and When Did It Open?

Apple BKC is at G1-G2, Jio World Drive, Bandra Kurla Complex, Mumbai 400051, and it opened on April 18, 2023, as the first Apple-owned store in India, with Tim Cook greeting the first customers. Hours listed on Apple’s Indian retail page run 11:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.

What Did Log Kya Kahenge Show at the 2023 India Art Fair?

Malhotra’s fair work was a set of family portraits with two layers: a conformist front the family wanted society to see, and an animated second layer, viewed through the Artivive app, that showed the household’s real dynamics. She drew the stills in Procreate, then finished motion in After Effects, under the fair theme “Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary,” with sessions running February 9 to 12, 2023.

When Were the Sydney Opera House Sails Lit, and Who Wrote the Music?

Illuminating Creativity ran on the eastern Bennelong sails at 8:30 p.m. on March 25, 2026, and at 8 p.m. on March 26 and March 27. Bailey Pickles, a recent graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music who started on Logic Pro at age 10, wrote the score; Apple’s newsroom says the mounted show mixed work from 11 emerging Australian artists and six members of the public.

What Other Hardware Did Malhotra Use on the BKC Mural?

She sketched on iPad Pro with Apple Pencil in Procreate, refined the art on a Mac, and captured early ideas on an iPhone, a three-device path she had already described in 2023 when Procreate’s PSD export let her move files into Photoshop. The public demo at the store walked that path rather than a history of Apple itself.

Who Else From India Stood on the BKC Floor That Night?

Besides Malhotra and Jain, actor Rohit Saraf spoke about his late father’s iPod still running after more than two decades, a personal hardware story that sat next to Jain’s argument for human-made work and Malhotra’s no-AI rule. Jain has said separately, “Everything that I’ve written so far is taken from my life,” a line the panel treated as the method behind the songs.