03 November,2020 06:47 AM IST | Mumbai | Team mid-day
Pic/Ashish Raje
Two youngsters are set for the festive season as they cross a road in Dadar with lanterns. Pic/Ashish Raje
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To foster their development, it is important that children interact with cultural spaces. And starting this Thursday, a three-day international forum called Engage, by the platform ThinkArts and Goethe Institut Kolkata, seeks to work on this area by bringing parents, artists, cultural institutions, educators, museum professionals, venue directors, and arts funding bodies under one platform. Supported by the Australian Consulate General, Kolkata, and the Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, the event will see panel discussions, workshops and even film screenings for children aged between five and 10.
Elaborating on how the forum came to be, Ruchira Das, founder-director, ThinkArts, said, "Despite ample evidence of the positive impact of arts experiences in the lives of young people, there is a gap in both programming and reach. At the ThinkArts International Festival in 2019, we held a roundtable which brought together various stakeholders, and discussed the ways in which this gap could be addressed. Engage is another step in this direction."
Tucked inside Colaba's Art Deco quarter, and known for its luxury clothing and lifestyle products, the concept store Clove is bidding goodbye to its Churchill Chambers outpost for now. Founder Samyukta Nair announced the move in light of the store's third anniversary. About what prompted the decision, Nair told this diarist that she is moving to London where her hospitality ventures are based. "Clove connects my upbringing in hospitality with my two loves: design and India.
In taking this time to pause and reimagine ourselves, we are faced with endless possibilities of a new avatar, perhaps in another part of the world - one that I greatly look forward to so we can continue to serve our community better not just in terms of a physical but also an online experience." In an earlier chat with this newspaper, Nair revealed that businesses like Clove were likely to survive the lockdown better than inflated retail models. Here's hoping it makes a comeback in another avatar.
Design consultant Joy Roy's new saree upcycling venture is strangely rooted in death. Roy, the son of filmmaker Bimal Roy and photographer Manobina, lost sister Yashodhara in January this year. Known for her impeccable taste in sarees, the garments, initially gifted to admirers, are now being upcycled by Joy into new sarees and the borders, into kimonos and potlis. The initiative is called A Touch of Joy, and while his sister's saree supply might be exhausted, Joy is receiving donations from people offering their own sarees; his first donor was filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur.
A saree upcycled into a kimono
The products will be retailed by Fort gallery ARTISANS', and will be available for purchase next week. Part of the proceeds will go towards supporting cancer patients - a cause close to Joy's heart since both of his parents died of it. "The challenge of trying to integrate several disparate elements into a seamless whole intrigues and excites me. And in doing this my eternal quest for beauty and perfection seems to have found its niche," he shared.
There finally seems to be some good news for the live music industry. The organisers behind Sunburn, one of the country's largest electronic music festivals, have announced that they will organise the event offline next month, in Vagator, Goa. Karan Singh of Percept, the firm that hosts it, informed, "We have also put in place all the necessary safety requirements keeping the situation in mind, including functioning at 20 per cent capacity." That apart, there will be no box office to ensure contactless entry.
In addition to the many panel discussions, sessions and workshops, it's the slew of literary awards that one waits for eagerly at the Tata Lit Live! The Mumbai LitFest. The longlist for five categories were announced yesterday. While nominations for the Book of the Year (Fiction) include Annie Zaidi (inset) and Aravind Adiga, the non-fiction category has William Dalrymple and TM Krishna in the running.
Megha Majumdar and Deepa Anappara, whose novels have gained international acclaim, have been nominated under First Book (Fiction), and Chitranshul Sinha and Viju B who've written books on sedition and ecological devastation respectively are nominees under the non-fiction segment. The longlist for Business Book of The Year features diverse themes - from Parmesh Shahani's Queeristan which is about LGBTQ inclusion in the workplace to economist Arvind Panagariya's India Unlimited: Reclaiming the Lost Glory. The winners will be announced on November 22, so watch this space.
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