The city - sliced, diced and served with a dash of sauce
Courtesy/Tushar Panchal@bombayiger via Instragram
Pigeon-holed
Some people dedicate their whole lives to a cause that might make little sense to the world. One such person is 57-year-old Henry Louis whose photo was recently shared by noted city instagrammer Tushar Panchal on @bombayiger. Louis, we are told, has been feeding pigeons for the last 25 years at the Gateway of India.
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So, when this diarist came across Louis earlier this week, she couldn't help but learn the ropes of feeding pigeons. After several failed attempts, we did manage to get a bird to sit on the palm of our hand, and down a few channas. All in all, it turned out to be quite an eventful morning. These days, Louis also mans the special enclosure that the BMC has constructed for the pigeons.
Pic/Sneha Kharabe
Let's take a stroll
Actor Gurmeet Chaudhary walks out of a Bandra restaurant with wife Debina while a stray wonders if he should follow.
The (TED)X factor
Ranveer Allahbadia, the man who made Tanmay Bhat's shocking weight loss possible, recently was one of the speakers on TEDx Bandra, a forum that hosts a series of talks across topics.
Ranveer Allahbadia
The 24-year-old, who runs a popular fitness channel on YouTube called BeerBiceps, addressed the importance of fitness for women, in a talk titled A Woman In The Gym. While the talk was much-appreciated by the cherubic-faced instructor's wide fan-base, there was no escaping the trolls.
Soon after Allahbadia shared his feat on social media, labeling it as "My TED talk", people were quick to point out how it was a TEDx talk and not a TED talk, and that the two are vastly different. Not that it prompted him to change the title, but perhaps, he might want to choose his words with care. It's a cruel world, after all.
Caught up in emotion over the Yorkshire cap
Glancing through a cricket memorabilia catalogue last week, we discovered that a Yorkshire County Cricket Club cap was up for sale in England. It belonged to Yorkshire's former spinner Arthur Booth, who played for the white rose county from 1931 to 1947.
Fred Trueman in his Yorkshire cap. Pic/Getty Images
Booth, who passed away in 1974 at the age of 71, was awarded the cap in 1946. The auctioneers are expecting the cap to fetch 250 pounds minimum. They truly realise its value, for until a little over a quarter century ago, no player could wear one if he wasn't Yorkshire-born.
The Yorkshire cap has always meant a lot to those who earned it. We'll give you an example: Fred Trueman, a proud Yorshireman and a great England fast bowler, got his cap in 1951. He went home that night only to discover that his coal miner father was off-duty.
When Fred asked him why was he not at the pit, Trueman Sr replied: "On a night like this in a Yorkshireman's life, he doesn't go to work. Come on, where is it?" Fred immediately handed him the cap. Sensing his old man was getting emotional, Fred turned to his mother who was watching from the kitchen and said, "Don't worry, Mum you can have my first England cap." Mrs Trueman burst into tears.
When Trueman Sr died, his son's Yorkshire cap was placed in his coffin. "It was his and he'd worked for it," wrote Trueman in his book, Ball of Fire.
Chai pe charcha
Kaushal Dugar, founder and CEO of Teabox, an online store that ships fresh teas from Darjeeling, Nepal, Assam and Nilgiri, will be in Mumbai next week for a business collaboration.
Kaushal Dugar
"I won't forget my visit to Mumbai in December 2015, when I was first introduced to Ratan Tata," he tells this diarist. "We met him at his unassuming office in south Mumbai. Despite my nervousness, I felt at ease almost immediately.
He was friendly and not intimidating. A little into our meeting, we were actually arguing," he laughs. Later that evening, Dugar received a call from his manager, informing him that the industrialist was interested in investing in his venture. "What he liked was that we were radically different [as people]," smiles Dugar.
Let's talk about our green cover
News comes from Stuttgart that theorist and critic Kaiwan Mehta has curated an exhibition titled A World in the City. Zoological and Botanic Gardens, as one of the many shows that the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, IFA) is hosting on the occasion of completing 100 years.
Kaiwan Mehta
Among the themes of the exhibition are the notion of the zoo as an ethnographic museum and the old question of exoticism. Mehta has chosen Jitish Kallat, Shelagh Keeley, Sonia Mehra Chawla, Sahej Rahal and Ruth Padel to be part of the show. Some of us will know that Padel is a writer, having authored fiction and non-fiction on animals and the environment.
She is also the great-great-grandchild of Charles Darwin, a name that should spring to mind a theme on botanicals. With all that's happening to Mumbai's green cover and the Byculla zoo, we so wish we could see this exhibition here too.
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