Mumbai Diary: Thursday Dossier

Feeling knotty
Actor Janhvi Kapoor ensures that she doesn't have a strand out of place while the camera is trained on her, after she arrives at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport on Wednesday following a trip to Singapore. Pics/Sneha Kharabe

Managing the creative arts
It was Albert Einstein who once said, "Creativity is contagious, pass it on." Well, the folks at Junoon - the theatre group that Sameera Iyengar and Sanjana Kapoor co-founded - are doing just that. But it's an unlikely group of people that they are passing their creative intellect on to - students at IIM-Indore. Junoon has created a special arts engagement programme for management schools, called Igniting Cultures. It involves teaching students the roles that context, history and culture play in different facets of life, apart from building a habit of thoughtful communication.

The course will be kicked off with a performance of Mahabharata (in pic, above) by Katkatha, a theatre group from Delhi. The play explores the inner characters and back stories of 14 characters from the epic. Each is an archetype whose dogmatic belief in his or her own ideals leads to conflict. Let's hope that this initiative encourages more management and engineering institutions to draw inspiration from the creative arts.

(Don't) mind your language
It can hardly be argued that English has become such an important global language that many people view it as an essential life skill to learn. But some take things too far, viewing those not proficient in the language as infra dig and consequently sneering at them. A new parody song now makes fun of this mindset. It's called Jai English Mata, and is sung to the tune of Om Jai Jagdish Hare. The hilarious lyrics include lines like, "Gadha bhi tumko paakar, gyani ho jata" and "Bas tumko ratne se, janam sudhar jata". The video includes devotees being blessed with "Thames jal", and ends with the actors holding up a photograph of Shashi Tharoor. That led him to tweet about the song. And all we wish is that other politicians, too, could take a joke at their expense, instead of fuming from the ears.

An Italian job for an Indian chef
Indian love for Italian food reflects in pizzas jostling for space with pav bhaji on menus. Now, chef Prateek Sadhu of fine-dine restaurant Masque, will tickle Italian taste buds with his dishes in Modena, which he will cook tonight with chef Luca Marchin of L'erba del Re restaurant. "I look forward to working with local ingredients and drawing inspiration from the history and art in Modena," the chef told this diarist.

Anand Dhanakoti performs a dance routine along with a partner

This cause calls for a party
Hark back to the last time you went to a bar in Bandra. Think of the hole the night-out burnt in your pocket. Now ask yourself, wouldn't you be a little less guilty about your depleted finances if you knew that your money had been spent for a cause? "Yes," feels the city's LGBTQ community, that is coming together to organise a party for Anand Dhanakoti. He belongs to the rag-picking community in Bengaluru, and dreams of pursuing dance at an institution in Germany.

"So we thought, 'Why do LGBTQ people have to mobilise forces only for their own purpose? Why can't we do something for others as well?'" Shivam Sharma, one of the organisers, told this diarist, adding that entry is open to all, meaning you know where we, too, are heading tonight if we step out.

A match not made in heaven
This is the sort of thing that spoils our mornings. We came across a newspaper advertisement that would have had us choking on our coffee in shock, had we been drinking it. It was a matrimonial ad for "young achievers" and "high net worth families". While the event in itself seemed quite unpalatable, it was the descriptions for these two categories that got our goat. "High net worth families" were described as "ultra-rich" and "celebrity and VIP" ones. And "young achievers", predictably, are civil servants, CAs and the like, apart from - get this - "beautiful girls". If that isn't the definition of misogyny, we don't know what is.

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