The city — sliced, diced and served with a dash of sauce
Cricketers should accept this Harrisment
Tour brochures for important cricket series have gone out of fashion in India. That's a pity because a spectator could carry it to the stadium and apart from being provided important information of players from both teams, there were blank scorecards to fill as well. And of course, brochures made for valuable collector items like the one our in-house cricket book scavenger scalped only recently.
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Lord Harris
This one's a 57-year-old Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) publication which features Richie Benaud's 1959-60 Australian tourists who clashed with GS Ramchand's Indian side which ended up losing the series 1-2.
Among the several messages in the publication which has printed autographs of almost all members of both teams, there is one from then BCCI president Ratilal Patel, who urged the teams to keep the spirit of the game in mind while battling for honours. To drive home his point, Patel chose to quote Lord Harris, that famous servant of cricket, a former England batsman and Governor of Bombay from 1890 to 1895.
Harris said: "You do well to love cricket, for it is more free from anything sordid, dishonourable than any game in the world. To play it keenly, honourably, generously is a moral lesson in itself and the class room is God's air and sunshine."
Times have changed. It's become a game where both sides believe they have to be ruthless to achieve success, but not all of Harris' words can be redundant.
A block-buster
Mumbai's debonair architect Sanjay Puri has a lot going for him. After winning the Progressive Architecture Award in New York for a downward-facing reservoir in Rajasthan, he has now been selected as finalist in the Architizer A + Awards for Ahmedabad's Iskon Temple. The NY-based award programme honours the year's best architecture.
Ahemdabad's Iskon temple; (inset)âu00c2u0080u00c2u0088Sanjay Puri
"The structure is inspired by India's centuries-old stepped wells, traditional jali windows and the shikhar (conical high roof) form of traditional temples," he says.
The main challenge for Puri was to use 2,00,000 sq feet in the best way possible and evolve a design that looked like a temple and not a large building. "We resolved this by creating subterranean facilities with courtyards for natural light and a large garden above," says Puri.
Good going.
Bollywood takes the literary road
It's not every day that you see Bollywood filmmakers take the literary path. This year, though, has been exceptional. After Karan Johar penned his memoir An Unsuitable Boy (with Poonam Saxena) in January, two others are set to release their books. We are talking about Tanuja Chandra and Vikram Bhatt.
Vikram Bhatt and Tanuja Chandra
From what we hear, Tanuja, who made her directorial debut with Dushman in 1998, and is the sister to author Vikram Chandra and journalist Anupama Chopra, has dredged oral stories passed down by her family, Bijnis Woman.
Vikram, on the other hand, is trying his hand at romance with A Handful of Sunshine. We are hoping that his protagonists, like his movies, don't take on ghostly avatars. But, for that, we will have to wait till until April.
Racing to the big finish
The closing week of the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, curated by artist Sudarshan Shetty, is already underway as the festival winds up on March 29 after a 108-day-long celebration.
Sudarshan Shetty
For the grand finalé, a concert by fusion rock band Thaikkudam Bridge followed by a closing ceremony at Durbar hall has been planned while celebrated Carnatic vocalist TM Krishna will be in performance this evening. What we are all looking forward to is the Kochi Biennale Foundation's announcement of the curator for the fourth edition of the Biennale, to take place in 2018.
So far, this festival has followed the practice of having artist-curators and we wonder if the tradition will be continued or renounced this time around.
When business gets creative
After three successful years in Delhi, The Coalition is readying to make its debut in Mumbai. A creative confluence of talks, seminars and workshops, the fest, in mastermind Vijay Nair's words, was "born out of sheer frustration of attending entrepreneurship conferences in India, where the creative industry has almost no presence". Over the years, the platform has made efforts to change that.
Vijay Nair
Slated to begin at the end of this month, the two-day event will see speakers like Zakir Khan, Harsha Bhogle, and the AIB boys take the podium. "It's going to be exciting to see the response to Mumbai, where the heart of the Indian creative industry lies," Nair adds.
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