The city — sliced, diced and served with a dash of sauce
Diverse New Year
Now that your phones have stopped buzzing with New Year wishes, it is time to take stock of one on our wish list. We wish for diversity, which means let this be a good year for the gay community. Less stigma, more acceptance yada, yada yada.
Women take pictures of a sand sculpture of a snowman holding a rainbow gay pride flag at a beach in Tel Aviv, Israel. The ‘Snowman’ marked the start of a two week Gay Winter Festival that will end on January 7, 2015. pic/AFP
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Let Mumbai show its gay spirit and the operative word here is gay, not spirit. Let us learn from say, Israel which goes into 2015 with the Gay Winter Festival, which began at Christmas and continues till January 7.
Last year, KASHISH, the Mumbai-based Festival of Queer films, opened with Out in the Dark a love story between an Israeli-Jewish man and a Palestinian set against political tumult. Sridhar Rangayan, festival director, KASHISH says, “There is a film school in Israel that sends us Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) themed films.
We are working on a collaboration with Israel’s LGBT fest called TLV Fest and hopefully, they would be doing a focus on India in collaboration with KASHISH. Through The Window, a short film from Israel won the Best International Narrative Short Award at KASHISH 2012.
It was a beautiful film about the quiet acceptance by a mother of her lesbian daughter. But the mother looks pained because she doesn’t know how she would be able to deal with the larger family. So in a sense the situation is very similar to that in India.”
Two faces ofa city: A gardener eats his meal alongside an installation in Mumbai on January 2, 2015. Incidentally, this is Chintan Upadhyay’s installation at Nariman Point near the Oberoi-Trident hotel and is a 10-foot head in flaming red. It has pictures of typical Mumbai scenes and symbols.
If this were a talking head, it may have spoken about the gardener who looks after this island we presume, eating his meal as the traffic roars around him. While the head does not talk, take a minute and there may be eloquence in that silence. Pic/AFP
Sartorial City
With the slight nip in the air, get your woollens, oh no, your bandhgalas out. The high-collared vest is on the fashion radar thanks to PM Narendra Modi’s high visibility.
Jyotiraditya Scindia (l) always the dapper dresser, in a bandhgala with racing man Zarvaray Poonawalla
Always a political favourite, it is now finding itself in wardrobes across the city. In fact, a very well known ethnic wear store in Mumbai, has displayed its range of bandhgalas with the catch line: ‘It is trending… in the halls of Parliament and on the walls of Facebook.’ Hmmm. Nice. Both the bandhgala and the lines.
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