Mumbai Diary: Wednesday Dossier

Pic/Satej Shinde

Kid glove treatment

Mounted on his father's bike and with his mother's assistance, a boy tries on gloves in a Ghatkopar market to welcome the winter chill.

New mood sets in

The Desible crew in action

The year-end celebrations have already kicked off at IIT Mumbai with the Mood-Indigo festival beginning yesterday. Over 1,46,000 students are expected to attend the college fest. The opening day line-up included director Anurag Kashyap and actors Alaya F, Karan Mehta on the dais. Stories seemed to be the order of the day with Vogue, the fashion show of the fest preceding a talk by a guest panel of Avanti Nagral, Aarya QK, Tarini Shah, Taneesha Mirwani, Aanchal Agarwal and Dev Raiyani, among others. Meanwhile, the International Music Festival held alongside the festival saw composer Nikhil D'Souza on Day One. The recent winners of the Beatbox India championship, Desible, will also take stage on December 30. Wa Da Phu, from the crew, told us, "We agreed because it was Mood Indigo. It's quite the stage to be on. We have a 25-minute set prepared that will cover hip-hop, beatboxing as well as upbeat dance hall music."

Riding high

Rohan V Bhatkar with the Indian National Flag atop Umlingla Pass on August 15

Fitness coach Rohan V Bhatkar is bidding 2022 adieu with three world records. The Worli-based athlete bagged one certificate from the World Book of Records London, and two from the World Book of Records India. "The London recognition came after I scaled the world's highest motorable pass - Umlingla, which is situated 19,024 feet above sea level. I started my journey from Khardungla Pass on August 6," he shared. The other two honours recognised the fact that he covered 49 coastal forts between Mumbai and Goa on bike in nine days, and performed aerial asana - while parasailing - for over two minutes above Malvan beach.

Music's young dream

Ishaan shoots for the new album

Eight-year-old Ishaan Chintamani's heartwarming covers with his dad, Gaurav Chintamani, bassist at Indian fusion band Advaita, are quite popular on the Internet. This diarist keeps scrolling through their reels, especially for covers of songs such as Stairway to heaven, Big yellow taxi, Wildflowers to end the day on a positive note. And now, as the holiday season is underway, Ishaan's first single titled, Carol of the bells, dropped online. About the idea, Gaurav shared with this diarist, "Ishaan has been singing for a while now, and it has been our regular practice to pick up a carol and sing. We did this last year as well. This time, we decided to take it a step further by recording it in a studio to create a proper production. The idea was to create an album, but we might look at it for next year. The song was picked by my wife, and my son is familiar with most of the carols. So, he chose to sing it." Head to @gaurav_chintamani to listen to Ishaan ring in the Yuletide spirit.

Christmas local

On listening to the parody song, Virar fast - made to the tune of Jingle bells - go, "At Churchgate we began, quite slowly at the start, but then the driver made a plan, to tear the tracks apart' - we felt that if you're not struggling to breathe in this 12-couch local train, you will be sceptical about the train staying on the tracks. The song was created in 2020 by Rishad Ghiara, a travel enthusiast, but is making the rounds again this holiday season. The song reminds us that some details are never too old to joke about.

Playing cat and mouse in Bandra

Even after more than 35 years since its publication, Maus by American author and cartoonist Art Spiegelman stays hauntingly relevant. The series on Holocaust is currently available at The Comic Book Store in Bandra. "Many customers were inquiring after the graphic novel and we had to source it. The first lot sold out on the first day itself. Maus is relevant to this day because it tells the story of ‘survivors of survivors' while sketching a father-son relationship. I like how the illustrator uses a postmodern technique to depict the Germans as cats and Jews as mice to make us witness the ceaseless cat-mice chase in those times," said bookshop owner Hamza Sayed.