Mumbai Diary: Wednesday Dossier

Pic/Sameer Markande

Seeing red

A bull battles with a chair while a woman captures the moment on her phone, at Bhandup West on Tuesday.

All seats bright and beautiful

In a dark time, where the Coronavirus outbreak has spelt doom and disaster on so many levels, any brightness is welcome. This scene at the Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay Udyan park at Dadar West, opposite Our Lady of Salvation Church, also known as Portuguese Church, caught us pleasantly unawares. As the sun started slipping, with just that hint of darkness late evening, the benches in the park lit up. We have seen buildings with lights, fairy lights strung between trees, and bulbs glowing amidst branches, but bright benches? Kudos to the creativity at this pleasant garden.

A lifetime's worth of words

Anita Desai. Pic/Jerry Bauer

Author Anita Desai's longstanding contribution to the field of literature has got recognised once again. She has been conferred with the Tata Literature Live! Lifetime Achievement Award for 2021. Desai has written books like Fire on the Mountain and Baumgartner's Bombay, and speaking about receiving the news of the award, she shared, "I was convinced that I and my work belong to a distant past, and my presence here is the presence of a ghost!"

Here is some food for thought

The restaurant industry has been one of the hardest hit in the past year. A new report titled COVID Impact on the Food Services Industry, compiled by National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI), indicated that the Indian food services market saw a degrowth of 53 per cent in financial year (FY) 2021 as compared to FY 2020, leading to permanent closure of over 25 per cent of food business operators. It also resulted in job losses of around 24 lakh people. Restaurateur Riyaaz Amlani, who was present at the launch of the report, shared that the numbers drive home the message that restaurants need government intervention to bounce back. "What the government can do is proactively reconsider our input tax requirements against the GST, and boost ease of doing business considering the Indian F&B industry is one of the most highly regulated industries around. Authorities also need to increase the time period for which restaurants can remain open as this will help us," he pointed out.

Planting an idea in children

Learning and caring about the planet is an important lesson that needs to be inculcated in children, and a new title called Environmental DIY Guidebook for Schools aims to do just that. Earth Watch Institute India, part of global NGO Earth Watch that works towards bringing laypeople closer to science, has commissioned it.

Lead author Dr V Shubhalaxmi (below, in pic) told us that the book is divided into chapters based on themes like birds, insects, trees, gardening and sustainable living. "Each chapter contains five activities that children can try at home. The purpose of the book is primarily to provide students with hands-on experience," she shared, adding that it will be launched in November as a physical copy and as an online version available for free download.

Dramas see pandemic theme

A still from a rehearsal for Jhund

The Ranga Shankara Theatre Festival is being held in Bengaluru at present in a hybrid format, where some plays are being staged physically while others are being screened online. The theme for this year is Staying alive, in reference to the pandemic over the past 18 months. The theatre fraternity was invited to send entries for plays based on the impact that this period has had on humankind, and Jhund, one of the new plays being staged offline, encapsulates the whole idea of the choices we are faced with now that things are opening up again. "What is the wise choice? Do we stay inside or go outside?" asked Shubham Roy Choudhury, who's produced the play that Chaitanya Vyas has directed, adding that the story is adapted from two texts - Czech playwright Slawomir Mrozek's Striptease and Gujarati writer Ghanshyam Desai's short story, The Crowd. Other productions at the festival include Panchhi, Contractions and Hunkaro, all of which have shades of the pandemic in the plotline.