Mumbai Diary: Monday Dossier

Kunal Vijayakar

Remembering JRD Tata
As comic buddies Kunal Vijayakar and Cyrus Broacha hopped on to a flight on Saturday by the Tata joint venture Vistara to travel to Delhi for a gig, Vijayakar did something that warmed our hearts. Before the air hostess asked him to put his phone on flight mode, he quickly remembered to tweet a picture of JRD Tata, paying obeisance to India's first licensed pilot on the 84th anniversary of his maiden flight.

Behind the scenes

Pic\Pradeep Dhivar

An attendant gives actress Bipasha Basu's hair the final touches at the inauguration of an upmarket beauty store in Malad over the weekend.

Where the chefs dine
A popular pan-Asian restaurant in the city completed 15 years this weekend, and some of Mumbai's much-loved chefs were in attendance to celebrate the occasion.

Saransh Goila

Celebrity chef Saransh Goila, The Bombay Canteen's executive chef, Thomas Zacharias, and food writer Nikhil Merchant savoured the restaurant's famous 1,000-layered puff and posted some drool-worthy pictures online. Now that the joint has such endorsers, we hope it celebrates many more such anniversaries.

Beyond politics
The one thing that Congress leader Milind Deora hasn't stopped doing, even as he now has the ‘former' prefix to his MP status, is engaging in initiatives he feels for. Barring his soccer talent hunt for underprivileged kids, most of these initiatives have been related to politics.

Milind Deora

But this time's a little different. Having recently joined the advisory board of Iceland-based Arctic Assembly, a network of international dialogue and cooperation on the future of the Arctic, Deora is learning about Mumbai's symbiotic relationship with the polar region. We hope the lessons he learns are put to judicious use.

Bust those lies with a game
As more and more outrageous revelations are made about Donald Trump, he seems to be getting on the nerves of people way beyond the United States.

A Finnish company has developed an online game and mobile app that lets users fling cartoon globes, charts and textbooks at a cartoon image of Trump that issues his actual tweets on climate change and other scientific topics. The man, at least until he became the presidential nominee, believed that global warming is a Chinese ploy. Sigh, why aren't we surprised?

Writers unite to protect dissenting voices
Dalit writers Pradnya Pawar and Dr Raosaheb Kasabe had to leave a meeting organised by the Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad recently as there were protests claiming that they had hurt sentiments of the Maratha community and made objectionable statements about Shivaji.

Kiran Nagarkar

Writers like Kiran Nagarakar, Gita Hariharan, Gopal Guru, Adil Jussawala and Rahman Abbas have joined hands to voice their dissent in a statement: "Of course, the ‘protesters' had not even heard the writers' speeches. In fact, the two talks were well received: Pawar spoke about cultural terrorism, and Kasabe spoke of caste hegemony. Who can take on these issues if not writers and scholars like them?" And, this they see as a ploy to crush dissenting Dalit voices.