Mumbai Diary: Sunday Dossier

Pic/Satej Shinde

Whatchoo lookin at?

A pedestrian locks eyes with a statue depicting the Galavasana pose at Vile Parle East.

‘Ira'-dicating stigma

We are all always more than any one thing, so obviously I am more than my mental illness. I am all the parts of me plus the variables at that precise moment in time. We're all dynamic and we always will be," said Aamir Khan's daughter Ira at the 6th anniversary event of The Hugging Club of India in Bandra earlier this week. The Club works to remove the stigma around mental health and Ira has been vocal about her battle with depression. The gist of her talk was that our trauma can be a part of us, but it need not define us. While some celebs merely lend their names to a cause, Ira is the founder of Agatsu Foundation, which works in the space of mental health. More power, we say, to Ira and her ilk for breaking the uncomfortable silence around the cause!

Dishonour to guest of honour

Everybody loves a comeback. Which is why this diarist was heartened to see Ritesh Bhatia, a Mumbai-based cybercrime investigator and cybersecurity advisor, as a guest speaker at the MIT World Peace University, which had once rusticated him from its hostel. "The hostel rector troubled us a lot," Bhatia tells us sheepishly. "Fed up, some of us poured sugar into the fuel tank of his scooter, which jammed the engine. When that didn't work, we dragged the scooter into a nearby gutter." Cut to this week, when Bhatia addressed 8,000 students of his alma mater on cybersecurity and data privacy. The university's founder, Dr Vishwanath Karad, was heading the institute when Bhatia was a student and the latter says it was "heartening to be welcomed and later felicitated by him." As the saying goes, every saint has a past, and every sinner a future.

Also read: Weekly horoscope: Check astrological predictions for all zodiac signs

Grand old man of Australian cricket is five short of a ton!

Neil Harvey (right) with the late Shane Warne at the Darling Harbour Convention Centre in Sydney on January 18, 2000. Pic/Getty Images

Neil Harvey, the grand old man of Australian cricket is 95 today. For being one of the most media-friendly of former greats, Harvey must be thanked and hailed. If he felt something was amiss in the game, he would speak against it. His forthrightness was not only restricted to utterances in the media. When he served as Australia selector in the 1970s, he refused to be overawed by the presence of his first Test captain, Sir Don Bradman. He pressed for the appointment of Ian Chappell as captain in 1971 and made other bold selections which would contribute to Australia's world dominance for the next few years.
We don't expect Harvey to be glued to his television set in New South Wales today as his countrymen take on India in their first 2023 World Cup fixture, but he'd welcome an update or two from friends. By the way, this diarist had the pleasure of meeting the batting great at Sydney's Darling Harbour Convention Centre in January 2000. Harvey spoke about how the 1948 Australian team were the finest ever. And he had proof - five members of that Bradman-led side were picked in Australia's Team of the Century at that function. And he was in it as a 19-year-old! Harvey, who made two Test trips to India, has come a long way.

Kej heads to YouTube

Abby V and Ricky Kej

Grammy-award winning Ricky Kej is taking his world music aesthetic to YouTube. The musician has joined forces with Toronto-based singer and social media singing sensation Abby V, and has been working on a collaborative album called Aarambh - the first single from which released last week. The album merges Indian classical music, electronica, strings, and beat-based ambient music, and keeps true to what we feel has been core to Kej - creating music anyone around the world can listen to, but root it in India. "The heart of the album is traditional Indian classical music," says Bangalore-based Kej. "But the instrumentation is very modern - it's in a palette that will appeal to people who listen to many kinds of music. We're taking Indian classical music to listeners that would not normally listen to it." The album drops on November 24.

Taking one for the team

Sukhada Chaudhary

When curators Sukhada Chaudhary and Pawan Sarda, and organiser Ruta Dharmadhikari, launched Vidarbha Literary Festival in Nagpur, in February 2020, the aim was to host India's first literary festival, exclusively for non-fiction. "We had a great start, and it was a fantastic first edition with authors from across streams," Chaudhary tells this diarist. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, the team couldn't host another physical edition until 2023. "However, a couple of days before the festival in February this year, our sponsors were called up by a group of people, whom I don't wish to name, and were pressured to drop certain authors from the list. This was despite the schedule being published," she says, adding, "We faced enormous pressure and our sponsors even threatened to back out." Some of the authors whose sessions had to be called off were Aakar Patel, Shivam Shankar Singh, Josy Joseph and Shruti Ganapatye. The curatorial team was also warned that going forward they couldn't have authors or books that touched upon caste, religion or any other sensitive issue. On Friday, Chaudhary, Sarda and Dharmadhikari announced that they would no longer be associated with the VLF, as they didn't "want to bow down to ideological pressures around selection of books and authors". "We wanted to announce it, before the next outreach of authors begins, so that people know that such a development has taken place," says Chaudhary, adding, "A literary festival is meant to be a liberal and progressive space. You cannot curtail voices."