17 July,2020 06:44 AM IST | Mumbai | Team mid-day
A girl enjoys a shower under a waterfall next to Powai lake
A girl enjoys a shower under a waterfall next to Powai lake on Friday. Pic/Bipin Kokate
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In a recently launched weekly podcast called Life Gone Wrong with Sundeep Rao, the visually-impaired comedian who hosts it shares his own stories and engages in conversations with guests who have lived with disability, have survived life-threatening illnesses or faced other adversities. "The inability to laugh at life's problems, challenges and inadequacies, is a disability in itself," Rao said, adding that three episodes have been launched so far, starting this month, and that people can tune in to the Spotify app so that they can listen to these real-life stories of resilience, strength, hope and love.
The initiative is meant for people who work behind the scenes at music events
The figures are alarming. The music industry in India is reported to have incurred losses worth '40,000 crore from January to April this year. Over 10 lakh jobs have been put at risk. And there seems to be no immediate hope for the people who worked at the backend of events, such as sound designers. It's for them that a group of entities including talent agency Spectal and Universal Music have started an initiative called Together for Tomorrow. "The target group has been without any work for four to five months now, and the situation is likely to prevail over the next six to nine months at least," said veteran sound engineer Fali Damania, one of the organisers.
The Belongg network, a social venture to promote diversity and inclusion, is seeking to launch a network of libraries across India. These will feature books and events on diversity and inclusion. "Before the lockdown, we had set up these libraries in Delhi NCR, Gurgaon and South Delhi, where we curated books on gender, sexuality, race, gender, disability and religion. We now want to scale the initiative across India. Since dialogues of diversity and inclusion are extremely important and more so, in smaller cities, we are looking at venues like bookshops, cafés and other cultural venues, where we can set up the Belongg bookshelf, and have these curated books on inclusion and diversity for people to access," Nirat Bhatnagar, founder of Belongg, shared with this diarist.
A Delhi-based art platform, ReFrame Institute of Art and Expression, is organising an online musical dialogue on COVID-19 and caste, titled The Singer and the Poet, which will feature Hemlata Mahishwar of Akhil Bhartiya Dalit Lekhika Manch and activist-artiste Sheetal Sathe, today. The session will address how the lockdown widened caste fault lines in the society. "A lot of caste-based crimes went unnoticed. We'll address these and other issues with songs," said Mahishwar (in pic).
A sea snake caught in a trawler off the coast of Sindhudurg
Did you know that sea snakes spend their entire lives in water, surfacing only to breathe? A study conducted by Dakshin Foundation sanctioned by Mangrove Cell and Mangrove Foundation of Maharashtra recently recorded seven species of sea snakes from the coast of Sindhudurg. These included the short sea snake, beaked sea snake, annulated sea snake, Malacca sea snake, pelagic sea snake, viper headed sea snake and little file sea snake species. "The survival of these highly specialised reptiles is threatened.
They are often caught as by-catch in fisheries leading to large mortalities. It is not a deliberate act," Neenu Somaraj, deputy conservator of forests, Mangrove Cell, Mumbai, confirmed with this diarist. She added that seven species were found in the by-catch of trawlers, gillnets and shore seines in Malvan. The researchers are also working to understand the decline and educating fisherfolk communities through workshops. "The aim is to ensure the safety and wellbeing of fisherfolk as well as the conservation of sea snakes in the Konkan," she added.
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