Mumbai Diary: Sunday Dossier

Pic/Ashish Raje

A beautiful mind

Photographed in her Lalbaug home, an elderly lady mulls over a crossword clue

One school at a time

This newspaper was the first to write about actor Rajshri Deshpande's inspiring work in constructing a Zilla Parishad Primary School in Pandhari, Maharashtra. With the help of CSR funding from CleverTap, a leader in retention cloud, she has personally supervised the building of another primary school in the tribal village of Dhorkin in Paithan tehsil of Aurangabad district. "One of the teachers from the school at Dhorkin, Alka Jharwal, had reached out to me, sharing pictures of the [dilapidated] school," the actor recalls. The school was designed by Pune-based Craft Narrative and construction took about a year to complete. "There are just 35 students in this school… so, it's a small space. But we have a huge playground."

A ‘reception' to forget for India's 1984 inaugural Asia Cup heroes

The Indian team which participated in the first Asia Cup at Sharjah in 1984

The ongoing Asia Cup is now a T20 tournament as against the 50-over format, which it started off as in the early 1980s. While looking up literature on previous Asia Cup editions, our in-house cricket nut found the below item in the Weekly Whispers section of the April 25-May 1, 1984 issue of Sportsweek magazine. The Sunil Gavaskar-led Indian team won the Rothmans Asia Cup at Sharjah by beating Zaheer Abbas's Pakistan by 54 runs in the final. We reproduce excerpts from the snippet: "Our heroes landed at Bombay airport, conquerors of the Asia Cup. smug and smiling, hoping to be cleared within minutes as the team was after arriving from London last year [with the 1983 World Cup], and waiting to be garlanded and backslapped by an adulating, multitude of cricket lovers. The only slaps they received were fines and penalties. The customs officers, perhaps knowing the shopping sprees Indians indulge in the Gulf were armed with their calculators in anticipation of dutiable goods arriving with our cricketers. They were not very wrong. The smiles soon vanished from the cricketers' faces as they found the customs men unrelenting. For three hours, the players had to sweat it out in the customs enclosure as the officers performed their duty of going through all the baggage. PS: Skipper Sunil Gavaskar and Dilip Vengsarkar were saved from this embarrassment and ordeal. They had arrived a day earlier."

When art meets food in Goa

Siddharth Kerkar and Bonita Mascarenhas

Artist and designer Siddharth Kerkar, son of artist Subodh Kerkar who is the founder of Museum of Goa, has started his own restaurant in Assagao, Goa with his partners Vipin Raman and Bonita Mascarenhas. "Being a localite and an influencer in Goa, there were quite a few restaurants that reached out to partner with me. But I am an artist and designer first, so the idea of merging myself didn't make sense," says Siddharth. "So I used the best out of all the people who had reached out as I wanted a restaurant with good food and a strong bar," he adds. Sopó serves Burmese cuisine and refreshing cocktails. The restaurant has an installation gifted to him by his father as well. Siddharth helmed the curation and design of the interiors. He has hand-painted all the walls and also used a lot of terracotta utensils on the walls to give a Goan feel. Sopó is a Konkani word for concrete bench. It also translates to easy. The third meaning is tax collected by businesses that run from morning till night. "All three meanings go well with the idea of our space," he adds.

Pizza hai Romana

SoBo's Navin Mittal, the owner of Gateway Brewing Co, has opened a delivery kitchen dedicated to Romana pizza, a style of pizza originating in Rome, called Pizza Dude. What makes this different from the usual is that it typically comes in rectangular slices, and has a thicker base like focaccia, and is eaten as a casual, takeaway dish. "In 2019, I was in Rome where I was introduced to Romano pizza, which is made from dough fermented slowly for over 24 hours. Cut to 2020, there was a lockdown and that saw me experimenting with this style of pizza and now it is finally out," says Mittal.

Champion stuff from Chirag

Chirag Shetty (centre) donating blood with the Mumbai Ultra team

Sometimes badminton aces take home a gold medal in other fields too. Like Mumbai shuttler Chirag Shetty, who recently won the men's doubles badminton gold with S Rankireddy at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. Chirag is the event ambassador for the Mumbai Ultra blood donation drive held every August 15 at Shivaji Park. The Ultra organisers (an Ultra is a running event with a distance above 42.2 km) have been holding a 12-hour Mumbai Ultra blood donation initiative along with Tata Memorial Hospital (TMH) since 2020 at Shivaji Park. Chirag was unable to attend this year's event, there was that little matter he had to attend to - a meet with PM Narendra Modi who felicitated our Commonwealth Games winners. The champ did though turn up at the TMH in Parel on Thursday, to donate blood. Doff the hat to you Chirag, you're a winner, not just on the sports podium, but in the game of life too.