The city — sliced, diced and served with a dash of sauce
England calling
The biennial AV Festival, based in Newcastle, has been awarded £98,823 to work with partners located right here in Mumbai — Clark House Initiative and Project 88. The support comes via Reimagine India, a cultural exchange programme between England and India, and three major contemporary artists will be showcased at the festival.
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Pallavi Paul
Works by Raqs Media Collective, Prabhakar Pachpute and Pallavi Paul, who has been formerly associated with AV Festival, will be produced and developed in locations across India in response to George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier and his legacy in India. What’s more, the exhibitions will be presented at the next edition of AV Festival in Newcastle and Northumberland.
Creamed!
Pic/Pradeep Dhivar
Singer Madhushree (in red) smears cake on Anup Jalota’s face during his birthday party held at his Shivaji Park home on Friday evening.
Strange case of lost and not found
Our in-house book scavenger was astounded the other day when he discovered that a UK-based auction website mentioned his name while announcing the sale of a bunch of Wisdens, one of which belonged to our cricket fanatic.
The 1983 Wisden. Pic courtesy: wisdenworld.co.uk
He can’t remember selling the cricketing bible but may have lent it to somebody who carelessly sold it along with old newspapers. That’s how valuable books land up at street booksellers. This incident drives home the point that one has to be very careful while lending books. Most books are lost forever because the lender has not kept a record.
Well, our man tells us that one can lose books even if a record is maintained. He once lent two valuable cricket books to a fellow journalist and when it was time to get them back, the borrower just said he hadn’t taken them in the first place. Meanwhile, efforts are on to retrieve the lost Wisden.
Will Nayar be third time lucky?
It would seem that businessman Arun Nayar has not let expensive divorce settlements dampen his love for the institution of marriage. He is rumoured to be in the south of France right now getting ready to tie the knot for the third time.
Arun Nayar, Liz Hurley and Kim Johnson
Could this be to 26-year-old model fiancée Kim Johnson, whom he has been dating since 2011, and got engaged to in 2015? His first relationship was with Italian model Valentina Pedroni, whom he married in 1997. He reportedly met his second wife actress Liz Hurley while he was still with Pedroni and ended up paying Pedroni £6,20,000 in his divorce settlement.
Hurley and Nayar got married in 2007, and broke up three years later after news of her getting close to Australian cricketer Shane Warne started doing the rounds. Some even said Nayar wasn’t glamorous enough to be Hurely’s partner. But, ever since he started dating Johnson, she has been referred to as Hurley’s lookalike in the press. Well, lookalike or not, we hope he is third time lucky.
A course for the learning disabled
In what could be a new era for students suffering from learning disabilities, the B.Ed (Special Education-Learning Disability) course was inaugurated by Vinod Tawde (state minister for primary, higher and technical education) on Saturday at the Hashu Advani College of Special Education (HACSE) in Chembur. The course, which is affiliated to Mumbai University and recognised by the Rehabilitation Council of India, will be a full-time two year programme.
Tawde interacted with 150 students with impaired hearing and stressed on inclusion of disabled children in mainstream education. It remains to be seen whether this “official” course does indeed manage to make a dent in the current education scenario. We can just hope so.
A book and a reunion
Last year, when author Anuja Chauhan decided to snap her eight-year-long association with HarperCollins Publishers India — on the insistence of her new-found agent Anuj Bahri — for Westland Ltd, nobody was surprised. At the time, Bahri had been vocal about how Chauhan’s new publishing friends were willing to invest thrice the amount on her next book.
But, it appears that Harper didn’t take it too well. “We gave wing to Chauhan’s writing career,” a source from the publishing house told this diarist. When the new CEO Ananth Padmanabhan took charge, his first task was to mend the broken ties. The result: Chauhan has returned to her one-time friends with her fifth novel, Baz, which will release in April 2017. Here’s to a happy reunion.
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