The city - sliced, diced and served with a dash of sauce
Pic/Bipin Kokate
Sitting pretty
Fatima Sana Shaikh settles into the passenger seat while leaving a bistro in Bandra on Wednesday. Pic/Bipin Kokate
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Thai honour for city chef
Chef Seefah Ketchaiyo of Seefah at Hill Road has done Mumbai proud again. This time with the Thai Select Signature, a prestigious award by the Ministry Of Commerce, Thailand. It honours restaurants that serve authentic Thai cuisine using unadulterated, quality ingredients and follows a process where officials eat at the restaurant several times to evaluate the food and the ingredients used, and to gauge consistency. Ketchaiyo received the award at the Thailand Street Festival that she helped organise recently.
"Thai cuisine has gained popularity here over the years due to the balance of flavours and the number of Indians travelling to Thailand. It's challenging to keep food as authentic as possible and maintain consistency, which is why we use products from back home. We are glad that people are accepting and loving this cuisine here," she told this diarist.
Stepping it up
Actor and dancer Robert Hoffman of Step up 2: The Streets fame, is in India for a two-week tour. But his exploration doesn't end there.
Hoffman and Arsala Qureishi also met Remo D'Souza. Pic/Shadab Khan
Hoffman will be collaborating with choreographer Ashley Lobo's dance academy for two masterclasses in Bandra and Andheri on Friday and Saturday.
"Robert is familiar with hip-hop and contemporary dance that is widely popular in the country, and his perspective on it will add great value to the dance scene here," Lobo told this diarist. Mumbaikars can sign up for the masterclass at a Danceworx centre.
All eyes on his future
Everybody in the BJP wants the party back in the government. The anxiety intensifies whenever cracks appear in the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government. The fall of the MVA depends on how politics plays out in the future, but there are party sympathisers who seek divine intervention and are also digging into the horoscopes of senior leaders to find out the brightness of their 'stars', which could help them spring back to power.
Ex-CM Devendra Fadnavis is one such leader who gets several uninvited visitors who claim to have an eye for peeking into the future and predict his return in the CMO sooner or later. But we're told the opposition leader doesn't take the predictions very seriously and has devised a trick to discourage the fortune-tellers without hurting their sentiments. Recently, two self-proclaimed jyotishacharyas were brought to him by certain BJP lovers. After giving a quick hearing to the predictions, he popped a question to the fortune teller. "What is the time of my birth in the horoscope you have structured?"
When the expert said the time was 9.30 am, Fadnavis said the information was incorrect, which meant that not just the predictions but the face of the fortune teller also fell flat. Fadnavis used the same trick on the other predictor with the same result. We have learnt that people now think twice before revealing their 'predictive' nature when they meet the leader.
Evergreen Sobers on the move
Cricket lovers have always marvelled at the all-round skills of Sir Garfield Sobers, but a WhatsApp forward of the West Indian great shaking a leg at an Indian wedding in Barbados has tickled enthusiasts of the willow game. Sobers, 83, is seen dancing to a Bollywood tune with no one in particular, amidst wedding guests in an open-air venue and enjoying himself.
He has always loved dancing and spent many a night at parties in his playing days. Sobers was not an early-to-bed-early-to-rise man but his late-night activities never affected his cricket. In fact, staying up late motivated him to do better for the team and he was determined not to let the critics tear him apart for, at times, dancing the night away.
A break in Berlin
The Berlinale Talent Campus is a prestigious six-day programme that takes place in Germany, where budding filmmakers take part in about 100 activities.
Seven Indians made it to the list of 255 participants this year, including filmmaker Prantik Basu, theatre artist and actor Geetika Vidya, and cinematographer Acharya Venu. Vidya, a Mumbaikar, told this diarist, "I will interact with individuals as well as organisations with the pre-eminent purpose being exchange."
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