The city — sliced, diced and served with a dash of sauce
Our fave Mumbai visitors of 2016
As we look back at the past 364 days, we cannot help but get a tad nostalgic about the month of April, when two royal visitors from the UK arrived in Mumbai.
The royal couple at Oval Maidan. Pic/Sayyed Sameer Abedi
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Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, were all the news until their stay in India. The couple paid their respects to the victims of the 26/11 attacks, visited Banganga Tank, attended a charity reception at the Taj Mahal Palace, and even played a few overs at the Oval Maidan.
Drive safely into 2017
Even as Mumbai revs up for the great New Year party tonight, there will be many more checkpoints to keep tabs on overspeeding and rash driving. "I cannot reveal where exactly," says Milind Bharambe, Joint Commissioner, Mumbai Traffic Police, "as checkpoints succeed because of the surprise element."
Milind Bharambe (standing)
There will, of course, be more traffic police presence around pubs and restaurants. "We have 56 hi-tech breathalyzers already deployed across the city, other than the older ones. These devices take a picture as soon as you blow into them and transfer data to a server, which now keeps a record of all offenders. Punishments will escalate in severity for repeat offenders," says Bharambe.
He adds that their 'don't drink and drive' campaign has been successful and today, those who err have reason to fear. Yet, the top cop smiles, "it's not all negative on the last day of the year though. My message to Mumbai is: Welcome 2017 grandly but safely as well."
An apostrophe for poetry
For Mumbai-based filmmaker and writer, Barnali Ray Shukla, 2016 will be a memorable year. With her poem Apostrophe, she became the India winner of the RaedLeaf Poetry Award in the international category.
Barnali Ray Shukla
An initiative of the Hyderabad-based RaedLeaf Foundation for Poetry & Allied Arts, the award was instituted four years ago with an aim to facilitate a wider reach of the works of poets in India and abroad.
'Kipling' bungalow 2.0
If you've ever walked along the road that skirts around the back of JJ School of Art in Fort, you've likely spotted a lone green bungalow standing amidst overgrown foliage. This structure — which has erroneously been called the birth home of Rudyard Kipling, despite being built much later — lay abandoned for a very long time.
JJ School of Art in Fort
However, currently undergoing renovation, it is expected to be all spiffy in the next few months. We hear that once ready, the bungalow will be used to showcase the works of JJ School alumni, particularly the works of MF Husain and VS Gaitonde.
A bookstore by another name?
In these times, when all you find as you look around are people glued to their cellphones, you would think bookstores are the last bastions of sanity. But what does one do when a bookstore tries to attract the non-reader — not to the titles on its shelves, but to the more materialistic things one can find elsewhere?
This is what a popular chain of bookstores has been recently trying to do in the city, and understandably, it hasn't gone down well with Mumbai's bibliophiles. Who, after all, would want to bump into a toy car while flipping through the pages of a gripping novel?
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