22 August,2021 04:25 AM IST | Mumbai | Team mid-day
Pic/Bipin Kokate
A frisky husky in the front of a scooter snapped by the mid-day photographer at Marine Drive, has dreams of making it big.
Alec Bedser (right) with England's then captain Mike Brearley in 1979. Pic/Getty Images
The recent Lord's Test which was won by Virat Kohli's bunch of driven, determined and dashing men will go down as India's finest Test wins at the spiritual home of cricket. Lord's, the spiritual home of cricket? Maybe, but there was not much seen across those five days to indicate that the spirit of the game was being adhered to, by both teams. There was far too much ugly chatter for the liking of purists although India's outstanding cricket came shining through. We stumbled upon a 1980 interview of the late Alec Bedser, who bowled fast for England in the 1940s and 1950s. He did so with great success - 236 scalps in 51 Tests. Bedser was England's chief selector when he accompanied Mike Brearley's Englishmen for the BCCI Golden Jubilee Test match held at Mumbai's Wankhede Stadium in early 1980. In that interview, Bedser wondered why cricketers had started to behave poorly. He said: "True, cricket is today played under a great deal of pressure with money also beginning to flow in. But
take a game like golf. There is more money in it than in cricket, but golfers certainly know how to behave themselves. Why should cricketers not do so?" Bedser had a point. It's something all those supporters of ugly behaviour should think about.
Given that social distancing is no longer an option but a necessity, India's Jiu Jitsu champ Siddharth Singh has launched Crosstrain30, India's first socially-distanced MMA fitness training. There will be no sparring or any sort of contact between participants. "Post the pandemic, there was a need for socially-distanced training while maintaining the essence of combat sports," he says, adding that the 30-minute long workouts are aimed at burning up to 500 calories. "The USP [of Crosstrain 30] is that every individual gets personalised training based on their own level of fitness. The idea is to get a professional fighter training next to an amateur who has enrolled to learn self defence. In short, it is for everybody".
Writer-journalist Josy Joseph whose powerful debut A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India won the 2017 Crossword Award for best non-fiction book, is all set to release his new book, The Silent Coup (Westland), which he describes as a companion to his first work. A Feast of Vultures, he says, examined the manipulation of the marketplace, the rise of intermediaries, and the reality that almost everything is on sale in this country. "In this [new] book, I am exploring and documenting one of the gravest threats to our democracy, which emerges from the Indian deep state. We have a unique challenge; while our military remains apolitical, the rest of the security establishment and most other arms of the government are being deployed by the political executive to subvert our democracy, intimidate political opponents, muzzle the free press, and create false narratives against critics. It is what happened during the Emergency of 1975-77, and it is what is continuing to happen," he says.
The only trinket associated with the evil eye is the traditional taaveez. But a Chandigarh-based visual artist is now bringing the theme of nazar to fashion jewellery. Surabhi Sahgal has been exploring the different kinds of gaze in our society, and using identifiable public Indian iconography such as truck art, to subvert both the male gaze as well as the superstitions surrounding the common âBuri nazar wale, tera mooh kala' slogan. The idea, she explains, was that through the ornament's placement on the female body, it would be equated with the vehicle the driver was attempting to protect, while challenging those objectifying her. The architect-turned-designer has been associated with the jewellery design programme MASieraad in the Netherlands.
Documentary filmmaker Simit Bhagat started The Bidesia Project to conserve Bhojpuri folk culture by archiving, reviving and promoting oral music traditions. The Mumbai-based writer has recently released a podcast on Chaiti, which caught this diarist's eye. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have a rich cultural history of folk music. These oral forms have been passed on from one generation to another. Unfortunately, many of these folk forms are becoming extinct, as there are no written records. One such form is Chaiti. He shares, "This year is a culmination of my efforts - my first feature length documentary film, In Search Of Bidesia, on Bhojpuri folk music and indentured migration premiered at the prestigious Dhaka International Film Festival and recently won the best documentary award at Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival in Britain. My bike journey and my interactions with folk artists from the region laid the foundation of this film, but my endeavour wasn't limited to a film. I started India's first digital archive dedicated to conserving oral folk traditions from the Bhojpuri region and called it, The Bidesia Project. Starting with recording five artists, the archive has grown to include over 25 folk artists and over 125 songs in the last two years."
