08 October,2020 06:14 AM IST | Mumbai | Team mid-day
Pic/Pradeep Dhivar
Odissi exponent Jhelum Paranjape and her students work on an online show at Carter Road on Wednesday. Pic/Pradeep Dhivar
As part of an international competition, city-based architecture firm NUDES conceptualised a rainwater harvesting tower for San Jose in California. While the agenda was to create an iconic landmark in the city for the San Jose Light Tower Corporation, the firm wanted to highlight the significance of water conservation.
Founder Nuru Karim is hoping that someone might take the proposal forward and said, "It is about 1/3rd the height of the Eiffel Tower. The Guadalupe river flows beside it, showing a sacred relationship with the site."
Last morning, this diarist had spotted walls outside Bengal Chemical Bhavan near Prabhadevi, diagonally opposite the landmark Century Bazaar, getting a welcome Warli visage makeover. Two BMC workers from the Labour Department, Shailesh Jadhav and Nitin Pawar were painting Warli art on the walls, transforming a sometimes grimy, white surface to an eye-catching roadside art project.
The G South Ward junior engineer S Gurav shared, "We are aware that they can paint well though they may not be known artists. These are essentially dead walls, which mean that not much attention has been paid to them. In this way, we give them aesthetic appeal." The ward's Assistant Municipal Commissioner Sharad Ughade added, "We have an entire team among our staff who use their painting skills to liven up walls across G South." Civic officials said that when the talent is within and the city is your canvas then, all's well that ends wall.
Instagram has introduced a feature called "Guides" to help users discover recommendations and tips from public figures and organisations easily. To implement this feature, it is now working with select mental health accounts in India, one of them being city-based mental health community platform The Mind Clan.
Co-founder Shweta Srinivasan explained that the feature allows them to select posts from their feed that relate to a specific topic on which they want to create a Guide, and club these posts together in one place. "I believe it will help us to disseminate our content on destigmatising mental health care more easily. We will also be using it to amplify the work of some amazing communities and organisations that focus on the intersections of mental health with gender, sexuality, caste, class, and disability," she said, adding that the first Guide is on "Easing Into Therapy" which contains resources that can support anyone who is seeking therapy for the first time.
Author Ravi Subramanian is having an exciting year so far. Only last month he launched a series of mystery-driven short-novels, and now he's releasing his debut fiction title for young readers. It's called the SMS Detective Agency series and the first title The Mystery of the School on Fire (HarperCollins India) will be out on October 23.
Set in a hill town, the story revolves around three mystery solvers - nine-year-old twins Aditya and Akriti, and their close friend Kabir. Subramanian told this diarist that this book is more special to him than even his first book for adults, written over a decade ago. "I have always believed that writing for children is the most difficult thing for an author given their span of attention, and how ruthless they can be in their choice of stories. They don't give you second chances. I hope children read these books. Not only read, but also relate to the three young detectives as they go about solving case after case."
Restaurateur Priyank Sukhija, who owns Plum by Bentchair, Dragonfly Experience, Lord of the Drinks and Tamasha, among other establishments in the city, is in seventh heaven these days. And no, it's not only because his restaurants will be opening doors soon.
Sukhija and his wife, Natasha Jain, have three reasons to cheer as they welcomed home triplets - Niko, Darius and Paris - recently. The happy father shared, "We read somewhere that there are less than 100 triplets born in India in a year. We were told that we could surgically reduce one of the babies, but we felt really lucky and gifted." The babies have started smiling, he revealed, and crawled their way to his social media feed with the hashtag #3illed. Indeed.
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