Mumbai Diary: Thursday Dossier

A skullpted body

Varun Dhawan beats the heat in this cool look in Juhu on Wednesday. Pic/Sameer Markande

The latest in Kapoor & sons

There's a Kapoor in town who's making his acting debut in the city this month. And yes, he does belong to THE Kapoor khandaan. Zahan Kapoor, son of Kunal Kapoor and Shashi Kapoor's grandson, is acting in a play called Pitaji Please, written and directed by Makarand Deshpande. The Ansh Theatre Group play revolves around how the love between a father and his son makes them share the secret of a lie.

The play also has Swanand Kirkire, Aakanksha Gade, Madhuri Gawli and Snehal Mandgulkar. With this, can we expect Zahan to follow the path his father has taken, dedicating his time and energy to theatre?

The wildlife lover

At a time when speculations about Rajiv Gandhi are doing the rounds this election season, Mumbai-ba­sed conservationist Prerna Singh Bindra took to Twitter to share a story about Gandhi, the wildlife lover, during one of his tri­ps to Corbett National Park. App­arently, Gandhi was driving the vehicle when it broke down. He started repairing it, but it sta­r­ted raining.

The caretaker (or cho­wkidar), instead of holding an umbrella over the then-PM's head, went straight for the director of the national park. "The chowkidar folded his hands and said, 'PM saab toh chale jayenge, mere offser to aap hain,'" she writes, adding that that statement had Gandhi in splits.

Another title for Arundhati Roy

Since winning the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 1997 for The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy's works have always got the literary circuit excited even before they hit the stands.

Her most recent novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), was also on the longlist for the Man Booker prize and took readers on a journey from Old Delhi to Kashmir.

And next month, My Seditious Heart, a collection of essays and speeches by Roy, will serve as a bridge to this 20-year gap and highlight the "destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military, and governmental elites". Publisher Simon Prosser even posted an image of the first copies of the book that hit his desk this morning, with the cover photograph captured by journalist Mayank Austen Soofi.

Human talk

Humans of Bombay, the Mumbai version of Humans of New York, is diligently followed by many for its detailed and quirky posts that tell the stories of Mumbaikers, which, put together, tell the tale of the city.

They recently featured a vegetable seller, who talks about how her son dreams of becoming a businessman and how they will never put a limit on his dreams.

And then there was BeBo, who talks about her career, her marriage and its initial complexities, and motherhood, and balancing work and family - showing that she's just another human of Bombay. Well, if you want to be featured or have a story to tell, head to Carter Road in Bandra West today where the team will be scouting the area for content.

Step into Khaleesi's shoes

With the series finale of Game of Thrones almost upon us, everyone is talking about the next twist in the monster-hit show. After the third last episode that released this week, everyone's question is "What will Khaleesi do next?"

While the second last episode of the series will answer that question, designer Dyuti Bansal has something for fans of "the mother of dragons" - dragonscale shoes. "It personifies the fierce Targaryen that Daenerys is. The design represents the strong armour she wears while also having a soft spot for everyone she believes in.

The scaled metal plates of the shoes contrast with soft feathers made using silk threads to represent her personality. The concept also draws inspiration from the extreme rusticity that's there in her glamorous image," Bansal tells this diarist. The metal scales naturally oxidise to give an old world charm to the footwear. Well, we know what we'll be wearing for the next GOT event in town.

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