Mumbai Diary: Friday Dossier

Egyptians of the year
Ananya Pandey shakes a leg with Tiger Shroff at a song launch of her upcoming film in Andheri on Thursday. Pic/Sneha Kharabe

Raan in a ranch
Ten days after she bagged the Outstanding Entrepreneur (Culinary) award at Mid-day's The Guide Restaurant Awards, chef Amninder Sandhu is off to a luxury ranch resort in western Montana, USA, where she is joining a host of well-known women chefs for a weekend of cooking demos and multi-course feasts. "I'm extremely excited to be a part of [the first edition of the annual event] The Wonder Women of Food and Wine.

I will be cooking alongside a list of James Beard Award winners and nominees like chef Kelly Fields, chef Valerie Gordon, chef Amy Nack and more. Most of all, I'm super enthusiastic about meeting like-minded women who play such a large role in shaping the culinary world," Sandhu, who helms Khar-based restaurant Arth, told this diarist. Of the four-course dinner to be served today, Sandhu will be responsible for the main course, for which she plans to whip up her famous raan biryani with Burani raita. She will also conduct a workshop on pickles and chutneys.

Debashish Irengbam and Anshul Vijayvargiya

A new chapter for scriptwriter duo
Scriptwriters Anshul Vijayvargiya and Debashish Irengbam, who have worked on popular television shows Adaalat and CID, have now collaborated on a mystery novel called Tune for the Dead (HarperCollins India). The story is set in Manali and revolves around a case helmed by a private detective named Dhruv. "The challenge for us was to create the mysterious ambience and moments of thrills, which we believe we have successfully achieved. Along with that we have created some fun characters and a world for our readers to visualise and enjoy. We hope that they will not only enjoy this but also ask for more. We are already working on the next in the series of detective Dhruv mysteries," they told this diarist.

Is this Naezy's asal hustle?
It's nothing new for artistes, sound engineers, producers and often even musicians in the Indian independent music scene to be shortchanged for their work. Earlier this year, for example, when Gully Boy released, we had written in these pages about how the film's makers didn't give Delhi-based producer Sez on the Beat credit for a song called Mere Gully Mein that he worked on, and which had featured in the blockbuster. And on similar lines, news now filters in that of all people, rapper Naezy - on whose struggle and rags-to-riches story Gully Boy was based - has been accused of not paying a graphic designer who designed the artwork for two of his songs. Antorip Choudhury claims that Naezy made him wait for an inordinate amount of time to pay for the work he did on the track Aane De, and later failed to give him credit for another song called Aafat Waapas. Naezy, though, claims that Choudhury is misleading people, and that he has been paid double of what he normally gets, while his credits are missing for Aafat Wapas since it was a "surprise drop". The jury is still out on this one.

From Down Under
Theatre artiste Ramneeka Dhillon Lobo has brought one of Australia's most renowned plays, A Solitary Choice, written by Sheila Duncan, in the city. Staged in India for the first time, the play has been directed by Glenn Hayden, and stars Dhillon Lobo with her choreographer husband Ashley Lobo, who is the movement advisor on the project. "This play tells a story which is relevant and I connected with the storyline at a very existential level," she said.

Mehlli Gobhai. Pic/Nancy Adajania

Putting a city artist in the spotlight
Artist Mehlli Gobhai passed away last year. His retrospective, scheduled this year, was cancelled in light of the NGMA space kerfuffle, and will now finally be held in March next year. Gobhai's retrospective has been co-curated by Ranjit Hoskote and Nancy Adajania. Speaking to this diarist, they said, "We regard Mehlli Gobhai as having been one of India's most distinguished abstractionists, one whose art drew on the abstract expressionist variants of the New York School, on sources in alchemy and cosmology, as well as on the deep abstractionisms embedded in the Indian cultural spectrum, ranging from everyday life to ritual diagrams. Gobhai's art was truly cosmopolitan. His work reminds us forcefully that there is no single path to the abstract, whether Indian or Euro-American."

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