Mumbai Diary: Saturday Dossier

The city - sliced, diced and served with a dash of sauce

A dhol’s house

Workers at a dholak shop in Lalbaug market are hard at work to meet the demand for Ganeshotsav. 

Madhav Mantri’s birth centenary on web

Taking Covid-19 restrictions in their stride, the family of late Test cricketer Madhav Mantri came up with a fine way to mark his September 1 birth centenary.

They developed a website (madhavkmantricentenary.com) which among other material, has video tributes to Mantri (1921-2014) from some of the best names in Indian and Mumbai cricket, starting from his nephew Sunil Gavaskar. There’s also a message from fellow batting great Gundappa Viswanath, who is married to Gavaskar’s sister, Kavita. Dilip Vengsarkar and Sachin Tendulkar too wax eloquent on their 1990 England tour manager.

The effort to get a galaxy of big names to talk about Mantri was made by his niece Arati. A good amount of motivation came from the fact that her uncle told her about his wish to live a 100 years. He fell seven short, passing away a few days after that May 2014 conversation.

Gently flicking away plaudits for doing what she did, Arati chooses to praise the cricketers who responded to her request for messages immediately. Some of them requested for a longish video to express their thoughts and with good reason, because Mantri contributed to cricket on several fronts — player, captain, selector, treasurer, Mumbai Cricket Association president — and much more. By the way, Nari Contractor speaks for 21 minutes!

Arati stresses that the tributes’ website was made possible by her energetic and talented family (the last message received was uploaded a few minutes before 12 am on September 1). The Mantri family has done well to pay tribute to a man who truly embodied what giving back to the game means. Click that link.

Shell, yeah!

Dr Shailendra Singh with a female red-crowned roofed turtle

In a boost for India’s wildlife conservation platforms, Lucknow-based aquatic wildlife biologist Dr Shailendra Singh was recently awarded the 16th Annual Behler Turtle Conservation Award, considered the Nobel Prize of the turtle conservation field. Dr Singh, who leads the Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA) India programme, is credited with starting the Chambal River turtle conservation programme, which focused on restoring the dwindling population of red-crowned roofed turtles. He shared that this is the first time that an Indian has received the award. “I didn’t expect this at all. All the leading turtle conservation forces of the world collaborate on this award. My focus has been on a severely threatened group of turtles called Batagur, of which three species exist in India, apart from another species, the black softshell turtle, which we recently re-categorised as critically endangered,” he added.

Wheels of kindness set in motion

Sometimes, it takes children to show adults the way. Recently, kids from a city-based initiative called Me 2 Kids Club, which comprises over 100 families from Mumbai, collectively pooled in 20 damaged bicycles that they repaired and transported to Chinchwadi village near Neral. “We have opened a sports and games library there, and we gave the bicycles to a group of boys on the condition that they would take care of repairing the cycles when needed, and let the members of the library ride them for free every Thursday. Otherwise, they can rent the bikes out to people for a nominal cost of '10 per hour in order to make some money,” shared Dilip Jain, who started Me 2 Kids Club. That’s a great gesture, we feel.

For our farmers

A new book, Ramrao: The Story of India’s Farm Crisis (HarperCollins India), reminds us of the pitiable conditions that many of our farmers live in. Nagpur-based veteran journalist Jaideep Hardikar (in pic) has penned it, and the title follows the story of Ramrao Panchleniwar, a cotton-grower in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region, who unsuccessfully tried dying by suicide after consuming pesticide. “He strives to make his life better, but almost invariably ends up with economic losses,” Hardikar shared about his protagonist.

Tech turn for Indian kid-lit

The Funky Rainbow bookshop

In the past eight-and-a-half years, Bengaluru-based independent children’s bookshop and book consultancy Funky Rainbow has single-mindedly focused on introducing kids to contemporary Indian literature. Since 2020, they’ve been running an online book bazaar, building a community of readers, parents, researchers and educators. “A lot of them ask us more about the creators of the books. Often, we lead them to the writer’s or the illustrator’s website. But of the 2,500 creators on our platform, not even 10 per cent have their own site,” its founder-partner Vidya Mani told us.  This has prompted them to start a new offering for creators. “We’ll make personalised mini websites for children’s writers and illustrators, which will provide their bibliography, trailers, reviews and the option to buy books too — something most creators won’t know how to do or it’s too expensive to do,” she added. Interested folks can drop them a line at funkyrainbowmail@gmail.com.

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