26 January,2021 04:12 AM IST | Mumbai | Team mid-day
Mumbai Touchdown: Travelling around might still be a tricky affair, so a group of visitors at Aeroplane Garden on Juhu Tara Road, Santacruz, give the Air India installation a spin.Pic/Satej Shinde
A group of people will prove today how there isn't any mountain high enough, literally speaking, even for the specially abled. Fifteen of them, assisted by 20 able-bodied volunteers from the NGO We the People, will scale Maharashtra's highest peak, Kalsubai, in order to raise awareness on Republic Day about protecting the environment. Vinod Rawat, who lost his leg when he was six years old, and who is the leader of the group, told this diarist, "We have around six people without eyesight and one person with cerebral palsy. We start at 5 am, and like I always tell people, I might be slow but I'll keep my flow. I won't stop till I reach the top."
Too Much Democracy is a collection of poems and a socio-cultural commentary, written by Ajay Singh and performed by Nakuul Mehta. And on Republic Day, arts platform Kommune has launched the first edition of this YouTube poetry show, lyrically touching upon everything from the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput and the ensuing media trial, to the virus, the vaccines and the shrinking space for democracy across the world.
"The idea for doing a full blown 27-minute poetry special came after a few of our poems found some resonance with the audience on social media. The 12 poems, while complete pieces in themselves, are also part of a larger whole that, when combined together, tells the story of the state of our democracy in 2020," shared Mehta (in pic). The aim, he added, is not to cater to a set of audience based on their ideology. "These are not anti-right or anti-left poems - these are poems of democracy as we see it today, full of chaos and with all its idiosyncrasies," he told this diarist.
In a boost to the Asian literature community, British-Indian poet Bhanu Kapil won the prestigious TS Eliot Prize for Poetry for her collection - How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion /Liverpool University Press) - yesterday. She becomes the first poet of Indian origin to be conferred with Britain's highest award in poetry that carries a prize money of £25,000. Kapil, whose Indian parents migrated to the UK, was educated there, and moved to the US for further academic pursuits. Author of six written works before this, the jury found her collection hard-hitting, for its focus on inclusivity and hospitality in another country.
In a step towards her dream to build an initiative along the lines of the Pink Boots Society in the US, which supports women in the alcohol industry, beer enthusiast Chatty Girija (in pic), who anchors the podcast Cheers Chatty, has announced the Good WOmen Beer Podcast that features 10 women from the industry. "They do the same amount of heavy-lifting as men. I felt their experiences should be highlighted, as women are mostly associated with the hospitality side, not hard-core brewing." Cheers to that.
The publishing industry has always been one of the most vulnerable, with censoring, bans, and injunctions pulling the plug on many important books. This time, it is investigative crime journalist Leena Dhankar's The Rxxx School Murder (Juggernaut Books), which was initially slated for release this week. The publication of the book has been put on hold after the High Court passed an interim injunction, in response to a plea by the St Xavier's Education Trust, which manages the Rxxx International School. The plaintiff, according to the High Court order, "is only alarmed and offended by its title" and is "not privy" to the book's contents, as it was yet to be released. The title looks at the sensational case of a Class 2 student, who was found murdered in a blood-splattered bathroom of his school in Gurugram on September 8, 2017. Dhankar had been covering the murder since Day 1, and was privy to the bizarre cover-up and destruction of evidence, and the framing of an innocent bus conductor by the police. "The book is the product of years of reportage and work, including hundreds of hours of interviews with the main players of the case. All the sources on which the book is based are detailed in an exhaustive 28-page note at the end of the book. Our intention was not to cause undue harm to anyone's reputation but merely to report the facts as they stand. Our belief was that the case is widely known as the âRxxx School Murder', as evidenced by the innumerable newspaper and television reports that use this phrase, which is why the book was titled as such. The court, however, felt that such a title could lead to an identification of the juvenile accused in the case [who has not been named in the book] and compromise an order of the Ld. Additional Sessions Judge, Gurugram, and therefore granted an order restraining us at the first hearing," Juggernaut Books shared on Monday.
