The city — sliced, diced and served with a dash of sauce
Leaving the slums behind
The first release of the Dharavi hip-hop collective The Slumgods is not a hip-hop number, as they’d have liked it to be. However, the eight-member band isn’t complaining.
ADVERTISEMENT
Having a song under a label as heavyweight as Universal Music India makes all the difference at the moment and it has taken them seven arduous years to get here. The track, Samne Yeh Kaun Aaya, is the first one to have been brought out by The Dharavi Project which is the CSR brainchild of Universal Music India and Qyuki.
Akash Dhangar, The Slumgods founder member, says, “It’s a remix track for which we collaborated with DJ Suketu and Thomson Andrews. Working with them was a great experience and the song has been getting some good feedback too.” Besides the band members, the music video features Brazilian actress and model Bruna Abdullah.
“It was the first time we were working with a model, but it was nice. There was no awkwardness, we did our job and she did hers,” Akash adds.
Big B’s broomance
Pic/Datta Kumbhar
Actor Amitabh Bachchan sweeps the street near JJ Hospital at the Maha Clean Marathon on Saturday.
Married to the Mahatma
Writer Neelima Dalmia Adhar describes herself as a passionate “people-watcher”, who is drawn to writing on human behaviour. No surprises why her new novel The Secret Diary of Kasturba (Tranquebar, Westland books), tells the story of the life of Kasturba Gandhi — the wife of the Mahatma.
Neelima Dalmia Adhar
Though fiction, Adhar relays Kasturba’s story through the pages of an imaginary diary. From what we hear, it is has a lot of titillating details about what it could have been like to be married to MK Gandhi. Adhar has plans to introduce this fictional retelling to the world before India.
The book will be unveiled at the third annual Indo-American Arts Council Literary Festival at the Kimmel Centre in NYC next month. The festival will see Adhar discuss the inspiration for her new novel. Scandalous or not, India would like to here these stories, too.
AB de Villiers and that dangerous prank
What do cricketers do when they return to their hotel rooms after a hard day’s play? Some catch up on sleep, order room service and probably go back to bed. Others like South African great AB de Villiers, play pranks on teammates.
AB de Villiers
AB mentions in his to-be-launched autobiography that one night in Kanpur, on SA’s 2008 tour of India, he climbed out of his third floor window and reached the back of captain Graeme Smith’s suite.
The locked windows prevented a “trespass” so he went back to his room, headed to Smith’s room, met his captain in the guise of a casual visit and loosened the window latch. He returned to his room and waited for an hour at which Smith was fast asleep. Convinced that the prank would work now, AB climbed out of his window again, got to Smith’s suite, entered and turned on the TV.
After increasing the volume, he hid behind a curtain and watched a stunned Smith wake up and lower the volume. AB repeated the prank. Next morning, he sat besides Smith at breakfast only for his captain to say that he was convinced that his room was haunted. AB revealed the true ghost before things got more scary for Smith.
Ganga’s beat
If you haven’t heard Beat pe Booty yet, you might as well be living under a rock. Everyone from Hrithik Roshan to Ekta Kapoor has made Instagram videos dancing to the song from the Tiger Shroff-starrer A Flying Jatt.
Singer and lyricist Vayu
But the singer and writer of the song, Vayu, has moved to serious concerns. He has penned the Hindi lyrics for Namami Gange composed by the Chennai-based Trichur Brothers, which is the theme for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Clean Ganga campaign.
“I’ve described Ganga as the purest river that cleanses us and is like our mother,” he says and laughs, “From booty to Ganga – in life, one has to be a magician.”
Conserving a partnership
It was suits and silks all the way on Friday night for the opening of ‘Conserving the Collection — The caring path for 5,000 years of our art’ at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS).
Mukeeta Jhaveri
The exhibition, which showcases the the museum’s conservation work, saw the launch of a book authored by Anupam Sah, head of art conservation. Among those who launched the book were Pramit Jhaveri, Citi India CEO, and wife, Mukeeta. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that Mukeeta had initiated this partnership between Citi and CSMVS.
“As CSR, several organisations are involved in important women’s issues and Swachh Bharat — all good causes — but our aesthetic and cultural legacy is at the risk of getting left behind,” she says. A former investment banker who now collects and consults on art, Mukeeta has certainly got her heart in the right place.
Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest news!" Click here!
