Mumbai Diary: Monday Dossier

Pic/Shadab Khan

One four All, All four one

Kids play around with a bicycle in Agripada over the weekend

Earth on our mind

Rachna Narwekar

For Rachna Narwekar, educator, environment is an issue that children have a big role in. With World Earth Day on April 22, Narwekar has joined the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in hosting a screening of Abhay Maskara and Sonia Nazareth's The Last Continent, along with a workshop for children. It is an ongoing effort to get kids involved through different mediums, particularly the visual. It is crucial, she said, adding young ones respond better to visual and fun cues. "I think you lead by example, if you do it, they will do it as well," Narwekar said. For kids, the workshop is a quirky excuse to make their own imaginative icebergs and penguins and take home a new toy.

Humour that fits the bill-i

The first artwork in Gitanjali Rao's Adarsh Billi series, with two cats - good and bad - headlining the act; (right) a piece from Rao's earlier Matchbox series

Director Gitanjali Rao is enjoying her time with a new hobby. An artist at heart, she has created a comical extension to her Matchbox series featuring felines. The diarist had previously written about the series, and was delighted to find the story taking a new direction. The filmmaker shared a new image of two cats - adarsh billi and badmash billi, on her Facebook page. "It kind of helps to know cats inside out, and there is a huge audience for it," she laughed. The series is a take on the An Ideal Boy charts that have become meme templates.

Gitanjali Rao

"The series will take on daily topical issues, twisting in a jocular way that you can get away with, because they are cats," Rao explained adding, "People would love to keep adarsh billi as a pet, but cats are wild by nature. They will be disobedient." While the director has consciously stayed away from Instagram, it has not stopped these caricatures from becoming popular; so popular that the director is already "in talks" about a future outside playful posts about these stories. "If I can find the time," Rao warned us from going overboard. For now, we are happy to keep checking her page for new updates on these cats.

Urban travels

Still from the short film Vanilla

Mumbai filmmakers are on the move, and heading to New York! Kanishka Singh Deo's short, Vanilla, has been picked up by the New York Indian Film Festival 2022 for a premiere on the prestigious platform. The short film, a take on the struggle of isolated souls in the city, will now premiere at the film festival to be held between May 7 and May 13.

Director Kanishka Singh Deo

Thrilled at the news, the director remarked, "This is a film about urban loneliness and how we all try to seek an authentic moment through an otherwise vanilla life." The filmmaker admitted that while the film is set in Mumbai, the subject will resonate with millions of people living in cities across the world. After all, loneliness and overworked souls are eternal residents of every city.

To a new audience

SH Raza's Church, 1958 is a part of the collection Pic/Pundole Art Gallery

For art lovers, SoBo's Pundole Art Gallery will be the place to hang around in the coming week. The oldest gallery in the city will be hosting a rolling collection of images from masterful works sourced from private and institutional collections. For the public, this is a way to access rareified works inaccessible to them. Owner Dadiba Pundole told this diarist, "It is not a collection, per se; they are images from various collections which we are going to be featuring. They are relatively rare and significant works. There are some from institutional collections as well." The idea is to expose more works of art to the people.

The mavericks of India's IT world

In the 1980s, when computers were still a novelty, and the IT industry was in a nascent, fragmented stage, Harish S Mehta, then a 20-something database manager in the US, swapped the American dream for his homeland. On his return, Mehta realised the need for a unified platform for IT professionals that could negotiate with the government and harness India's potential. That's how NASSCOM, or National Association of Software and Service Companies, was born in 1988, in Mumbai. "NASSCOM worked at both the India and the international levels to create opportunities for the industry to flourish. This encouraged a level-playing field," he told us ahead of the launch of his book, The Maverick Effect, which hits bookshelves later this April. The memoir traces the journey and impact of NASSCOM. "The IT industry changed India's fabric. Yet, the industry and NASSCOM didn't get due credit. As a participant, beneficiary and stake-holder, I took up the responsibility to talk about it," he explained.