The city - sliced, diced and served with a dash of sauce
Pic/Satej Shinde
Happy feet
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Two girls practice their balancing skills on a temporary barricade set up at Versova Beach.
Stage presence
Dastan-E-Badi Banka that was shot at The Box in August
Platform for theatre-makers, Strategic Management in the Art of Theatre (SMART), will host a virtual talk that will discuss experiences of theatre practitioners who run independent spaces across the country. The session will discuss how studios and spaces have adapted to the ongoing pandemic, and the challenges they’ve faced along the way. Speakers Kallol Bhattacharya, Michaela Talwar, Rupali Bhav and Manu Jose will be in conversation with Sunil Shanbag, theatre director and co-founder of Mumbai-based Studio Tamaasha. “It’s a conversation I will have with four such diverse spaces. Independent spaces have made a huge impact in the way that theatre is practiced over the last eight years, but they’ve struggled during the pandemic. These spaces have found ways to deal with the pandemic, so we thought it would be interesting to see what strategies they’ve implemented and what challenges they’ve faced,” said Shanbag.
Milky way
(From left) Chitra Hiremath, Hansu Pardiwala and Kunti Oza; milk bag collection
While plastic milk bags are a common sight in households across the city (more than 1.5 crore bags are disposed of every day), if not disposed of responsibly, they can pollute the land and water bodies and harm marine life. To counter this, Kunti Oza, Hansu Pardiwala, and Chitra Hiremath started the Milk Bag Project, which collects and recycles these bags. “We have created resources to teach people how to cut the bags properly, rinse and store them. We then collect the bags and send them to licenced recyclers, where they are upcycled into utility items such as bins and mugs,” shared Pardiwala. Contact them at themilkbagproject@gmail.com.
Eating their lockdown feelings
The recent reopening of restaurants across the country was welcomed by diners, who made their enthusiasm felt with a surge in both the total number of orders as well as the average order value, reveals a recent report by Dineout, a restaurant tech platform. While the report noted a 20 per cent increase in average transaction value across India, Delhi, Kolkata and Hyderabad showed the maximum recovery among metros, with Delhi and Kolkata operating at nearly twice February 2021 levels. As compared to pre-lockdown times, Mumbai has shown an increase in lunch hour bookings, from 24 per cent in February to 39 per cent in August. The report attributes this to the restrictions on dining out at dinner time. Diners also exhibited a marked preference for restaurants where the staff is vaccinated.
Clean bowled
Bestselling author and secretary of Tamil Nadu State Human Rights Commission, Dr K Vijayakarthikeyan has announced his new book, intriguingly titled Mafia Premier League. A fiction title set in Mumbai, it connects the lives of a notorious gangster, an ambitious cop and a cricketer on the mend. About the title, Dr Vijayakarthikeyan said, “Cricket stories in India usually have a match-fixing angle, which I wanted to stay clear of. I wanted to write an entertaining cricket thriller with a subtle message.”
Ammu’s happy plate of treats
Ammu is what chef Amninder Sandhu is fondly called by friends and family, a name that literally translates to happiness, she shared with this diarist. And happiness is what the chef aims to serve up with her eponymous new delivery brand that has just launched in Pune, and will soon be reaching Mumbaikars. Recalling how it all started, Sandhu said, “The complexity of the pandemic made us trash our pre-conceived notions of what should be done and how things should function. In fact, the delivery and take-out format is here to stay and will continue to grow unlike any other. Ammu is designed to satisfy cravings for Indian comfort food, and evolve into a household name.” Accordingly, the menu will offer nostalgia-laced food from across the country, from kebabs, tikkas and rolls to biryanis and varieties of traditional breads. “There will also be The Final Table paneer kofta that totally rocked the Indian challenge on the Netflix show, and Sandhu saab, my white chicken butter masala, and a whole lot more,” she promised.
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