Mumbai Diary Page: Saturday scene

They huffed and they puffedEvery male bodybuilder and wannabe must secretly wish he was Arnie Arnold Schwarzenegger for the uninitiated So when a popular chain of city gymnasiums recently announced a Terminator Challenge contest to coincide with Terminator Genisys that hit Mumbairsquos screens we wanted to see what the buzz was all about The event held across two of their outlets included an exercise and a physique based task The exercise based task had participants do dead lifts and leg raises with technique Some succeeded Others tried and failed badlyTHE BIG HEAVE Hardpressed at the gym PicAtul KambleThe participant with maximum repetitions was declared the winner With loads of sweat and tears too highly possible the event made a buzz Wersquore not quite sure though if some of the unsuspecting participants would say ldquoIrsquoll be backrdquo a la ArniestyleMaking rural India urbanIt took Ratan Tata ldquoseven to 10 years to get a telephonerdquo the chair of Tata Trusts recalled of his school days on Friday Tata was at his companys Bandra fivestar to launch a digital initiative in association with Google and Intel for rural Indian women The initiative plans to distribute hitech bicycles equipped with iPads a charger and and an Internet router to its beneficiariesRatan Tata at the launch of Internet Saathi an initiative to bring more women online on Friday PicSameer MarkandeThe initiative in its second phase had women who had benefited from phase one talk about how going digital had made independent An aspiring fashion designer spoke about how she surfs the Net from her village in Madhya Pradesh to stay in sync with trends The threeway initiative comes on the heels of the Digital India programme launched on Wednesday by Prime Minister Narendra Modi who pitched for a digital revolution in the countryThe initiative plans to cover 4500 villages over the next 18 months starting with Gujarat Rajasthan and Jharkhand and aims to reach out to about five lakh women Through the twohour long event Tata was the big draw Bringing the focus back to how much technology had changed he remarked to the audience ldquoMost of you in the room would not be even aware of them telephonesrdquoRogers just like usWhen Roger Federer is in action at Wimbledon itrsquos poetry in motion This diarist had tuned into live coverage on television that involved the Swiss champrsquos match against American Sam Querrey in a Round 2 encounter As the camera panned through the vista it was a pleasant sight to spot many Indians enjoy the action in the crowd A couple of festive shaaditype turbans were also spotted to offer muchneeded colour at the All England Club But what brought a wide smile apart from the fact that Federer was on a roll to our face was when we caught a blinkandmiss frame of an Indian spectator holding a banner in between one of the championrsquos killer returns It read lsquoSpicy Just Like Mumbai Masalarsquo Finally we can boast of a city connect with the tennis iconJimmy Choo for Mumbais trafficWe love to applaud the efforts made by the people who draft out messages at our traffic signals Theyrsquove managed to talk the talk by grabbing the eye with jargonfree simple languageRoger Federer PicAFPHaving said that there have been times when the signage on the electronic board reads truant blame it on a fused light perhaps leading to chuckleworthy bloomers Savour this recent one Itrsquos better to not play on the road itrsquos a game you cannot choo the lsquosersquo was missing obviously Now if only we could have sent this ode across to the famous shoe designer