19 November,2021 06:48 AM IST | Mumbai | Team mid-day
Pic/Satej Shinde
A horse caretaker keeps his animal from galloping away while sitting on a two-wheeler at SV Road, Goregaon.
Kurt Cobain's house in Olympia, US, where Meer (left) is staying
The house with the address 114 Pear St NE in the American city of Olympia is deeply intertwined with musical history. It's where Kurt Cobain, the front man of the legendary grunge band Nirvana, lived between 1989 and 1991 and reportedly composed the iconic album Nevermind. But Cobain is not the only person to have inhabited that house. Mumbai-based music producer Abhi Meer, who is in the US now, is also staying there at present. He shared, "The place has, for the lack of a better word, an aura of sorts. I often find myself awoken in the middle of the night with memories and thoughts that bare only a passing relationship to logic but enrapture my brain for hours in some kind of estranged realism."
Shashi Kapoor; (right) Kunal Kapoor
Late actor and producer Shashi Kapoor was not just a legendary artiste, but also a supporter of good cinema. That's how Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, director, Film Heritage Foundation, remembered him, days after Kapoor's son, Kunal, deposited films including Junoon, Kalyug, 36 Chowringhee Lane and Utsav that were produced by his father and directed by filmmakers such as Shyam Benegal, Aparna Sen and Girish Karnad, with the foundation. "We're delighted to preserve these films. Look at the films Kapoor produced. He launched Sen; and worked with Karnad and Benegal. They're important directors and these are milestone films," he said.
Kabir Bedi; (middle) Shatrughan Sinha and Dr Mrunal Naik
In its third edition this year, and after an online avatar in 2020, the Orange City Literature Festival of Nagpur is back this time in a hybrid format. Project head Dr Mrunal Naik (inset) shared that the three-day fest starting November 26 will feature both online and offline sessions. "Shatrughan Sinha will be inaugurating the festival in Nagpur. Our speakers include Kabir Bedi, Dr Radhakrishnan Pillai, Pushpendra Kulshrestha, Devdutt Pattanaik and Jairam Ramesh, among several others, across online and offline sessions. We'll also have a line-up of performing artistes from Nagpur putting up a show," she shared. The discussions will span topics such as publishing, management, political conspiracies, women empowerment and celebrity culture's impact on society, among others.
Back when Bombay Theatre Company was "just on a piece of paper as a registered organisation", founder Raveesh Jaiswal had written a play, The 6 PM Struggler. It was set to premiere in April 2020, but the world changed. Rolling with the times, they took the virtual route. But come December, they will make a debut on the offline stage with The 6 PM Struggler. "I always had the chance to do it virtually, but I felt that it would be best to perform it before a live audience, and was willing to wait," he told us, adding, "One of the main reasons I feel people will connect with this play is because it highlights a very common dilemma in our society: passion versus profession."
Aditya Kripalani (right) A still from Not Today
Indie filmmaker Aditya Kripalani has been making a buzz in inter-national film circles with Not Today, which features actors Harsh Chhaya and Rucha Inamdar, and is centred on suicide prevention. Recently, it was officially selected in the NETPAC category at the Asian Film Festival Barcelona. "It feels great when you make a film that has a specific context - it's about a Bohri Muslim girl who hasn't told her family that she's working as a suicide prevention counsellor in Mumbai, where such centres function differently - and you see it doing well outside, resonating with people who aren't from the country. You're always taught in film school how the personal is universal; it seems to be doing that," Kripalani told this diarist.
