Mumbai Diary: Thursday Dossier

Pic/Atul Kamble

Rain, rain, come again

A woman tries to manage her vibrant umbrella against a strong breeze on the Marine Drive promenade, as revellers around her have a good time.

Bridging gaps

Penelope Featherington in the web series. Pic Courtesy/Instagram

Pardon our Gen Z vocabulary, but Mumbai Police's Instagram game is ‘dripping with rizz' (brimming with finesse, for the uninitiated). The department's latest move in their bid to make road safety cool is a spin on dialogues from the popular Netflix web series Bridgerton.

A post made by the Mumbai police

"Just keep looking at me. No one else matters," reads one of the posts about signal discipline.

Vivek Phansalkar

"Our teams are always open to engaging with the community through the most effective and accessible mediums. We wish to follow the citizen's hearts and also nurture their minds," Vivek Phansalkar, Mumbai Police Commissioner, told us.

To the good old times

Crosswind band members (from left) Sanjay Divecha, Mark Menezes on drums, Ehsaan Noorani on guitar and Jayu Menon on bass

Musician Ehsaan Noorani recently took his fans down a memory lane very few are aware about. A photograph from the early 1980s featured Noorani in a boy band, Crosswinds. In what he calls the best days of his life, guitarist and composer Sanjay Divecha plays a lead role. "I was only 17 when I founded the band with Kulin Giri and Jayu Menon." Divecha recalled. The group played one of the first gigs at the now-shuttered Rang Bhavan near St Xavier's College. Many members joined and exited the group; the final one that played until the late '80s featured Noorani. "We played rock. There was no Internet, and TV had just been introduced. So, we didn't get as much exposure, but we did get invited to fests like Mood Indigo by IIT Bombay, fests by St Xavier's, institutes in Manipal and Baroda [Vadodara], among others. And we were even paid for most of these as college boys!" he chuckled. "The band members went their separate ways in 1987. Unlike Ehsaan and me, most of them didn't take up music professionally. But these were the days that laid ground for the musician I am today," he told this diarist.

A sparkling trophy for Tara

In February last year, Poonam Ahuja, co-founder of Vasai's pet adoption service Caniadoptu, found three cats in a garbage bag left at her doorstep. It was dark outside; one of the cats stood out with her light-coloured fur. "She was sparkling like a star," Ahuja recalled. So, she named her Tara (below). In June last year, Tara was adopted at the annual Feline Club of India Cat Championship Show. Last Sunday, Tara's adoptive parent Mihir Kamble returned to the championship with her. "This time, she participated and won the first position in Reserve Best of Breed category," Ahuja beamed, adding that Tara's story shows how indie cats are just as special as other breeds. "We hope that Tara's story encourages people to adopt [indie] pets. It is a great way to give animals home, and it is free!" she signed off.

Charles Correa and climate change

The Gold Medal, designed by Correa. He approached Titan Watches to cast it for him

In June 1988 my father, Charles Correa's practice had completed 40 years, and to commemorate the occasion he decided to do something for the profession. It was then that he thought of giving a gold medal to the undergraduate student of architecture with the best thesis project," recalls Nondita Correa-Mehrotra, director, The Charles Correa Foundation, which recently announced entries for the Charles Correa Gold Medal 2024, an annual award initiated in 1998 by the celebrated Indian architect and urbanist. The medal recognises talent among young students of architecture for their undergraduate thesis project in a first professional degree course. "At that time, it was restricted to colleges near Mumbai. Three to four colleagues would be on the jury with him to select that year's winner. It was then given at an event - I think the first year it was at the lecture his good friend, the Italian architect Renzo Piano, gave in Mumbai at the UDRI," she recalls.

Correa with his daughter, Nondita, outside the Charles Correa Foundation office in Panaji

With climate change impacting our lives, she reminds us of her father's vision and why today's aspiring architects must be serious about it, "Climate responsive design is most likely the leading issue that architects and urbanists need to address. In the last three years, the foundation used the theme ‘Form Follows Climate', a provocation Charles Correa set out for architects in the 1970s, during the energy crisis, arguing that buildings needed to be responsive to climate. He explained his own work through this lens." Nondita wants students today to focus on climate, on energy, on low carbon materials.

Jury deliberations-Charles Correa with colleagues. PICs COURTESY/ © Charles Correa Associates, Charles Correa Foundation

She is excited with these strong thesis projects that stand out not just for their architectural design but also for their stance on social issues. Nondita revealed about the foundation's digital repository of all the submitted theses that they call the "Storehouse". In fact, current students who are preparing to do their theses can refer to the Storehouse on their website. After colleges send in the respective student's work by August, the foundation will invite a jury for 2024, and the gold medal will be awarded by early November.