The city - sliced, diced and served with a dash of sauce
Pic/Kirti Surve Parade
Here's looking at you
Sangeet Natak Akademi award winner Shakuntalabai Nagarkar at a practice session for Love and Lavani at Prithvi Theatre, Juhu, as part of Lavani Week
Bottle your recipes
Cook like your mom? There’s an app for it
How we wish we could all cook as well as our moms and grandmoms. But getting a recipe out of them is tough, especially when instructions include “thoda sa” and “andaaze se”. Nivaala, a platform that documents and preserves heirloom recipes, decided to become a solution to this problem. Founded by Shruti Taneja, the platform has always been one to collect and document recipes of families, cultures, and communities. Now, they have launched the Nivaala app, which allows you to hit record and have your mother or grandmother speak into your phone to document the recipe. The voice-to-text feature automatically transcribes the recording and creates a PDF of the recipe. One can also create a family group and share the culinary heritage, no matter what part of the world they are in. Nivaala has launched on the App Store gaining 80 organic users in two weeks, and is set to release on Play Store by next week.
Loving India
Rituparna Chatterjee
In her latest work, How India Loves: Love Stories from the World’s Largest Democracy, journalist Rituparna Chatterjee writes, “We are who we love, what we love, how we love, and why we love…” Decoding these lines, Chatterjee explains, “My work in all realms of life has been based on the idea that feeling, receiving, or giving love is all about feeling safe. The entirety of How India Loes surrounds my belief that safety is a core human need.” How India Loves delves into aspects of modern relationships in India including trauma, intimacy, marriage, extra-marital affairs and societal norms. She continues, “Over the many years I spent curating the hundreds of voices captured in my columns and this book, I always seemed to attract people who wanted to share their stories with me. This is why How India Loves was born,” Chatterjee notes.
Hang on, thank Pawar for IPL
Sharad Pawar and (extreme right) Lalit Modi in the IPL’s infancy
Sharad Pawar, the former Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) president, has the cricket association’s Bandra Kurla Complex ground named in his honour. The yet-to-be-completed cricket museum will have his name to it. And the other day, the rulers of city cricket announced at the MCA Annual General Meeting that a stand at Wankhede Stadium will bear the veteran politician/cricket administrator’s name. The MCA’s post on X, announcing the Shri Sharad Pawar Stand, was met with negative comments (261 comments as of 8 pm on Saturday). “And make Ricky Ponting inaugurate it,” said one user. It can be recalled that Ponting’s Australian team were in great hurry to see Pawar off the Brabourne Stadium stage after he presented Ponting the 2006 Champions Trophy. Jokes aside, cricket fans must remember that if they feel the Indian Premier League is a boon to Indian cricket, Pawar, as president of the BCCI, gave Lalit Modi all the backing to kick off the glitzy league in 2008. We can tell you that the IPL wouldn’t have taken off had it not been for the Pawar
factor.
It’s time for the desi gurrl to slay
Queen Priyanka started her debut tour in India with a performance in Mumbai at Kitty Su last week. Pic courtesy/Kitty Su
What do you do when you’re a drag queen but your Indian-Guyanese family doesn’t know about it or the fact that you’re gay? You use your drag persona as a decoy girlfriend! That’s what Canadian drag star Queen Priyanka did until a few years ago. Then, of course, she went on to win the debut season of the reality TV show Canada’s Drag Race in 2020, and the whole world learnt who she was. “My dad just saw me do drag for the first time in December in Guyana, where being gay is super hard [Guyana is the only country in South America where same-sex intimacy is criminalised], and he understood how beautiful the art form is,” says Priyanka. From performing in her father’s country, the drag queen arrived in Mumbai last weekend to make her debut in her mother’s homeland. As the first desi queen to join the iconic Drag Race fame, bringing visibility to brown performers is an important mission for Priyanka, who named her stage persona after the first desi person she saw make it big internationally—Priyanka Chopra. “In Canada, and in the States, she was one of the first brown people I ever saw on television. I thought if I name myself Priyanka, people will know a brown person is coming on stage,” she tells us as we chat shortly before her show at Kitty Su. Being a desi Drag Race winner “is the thing I’m most proud of”, she says, “I think to be able to go head to head with the white queens, and to show that there is space for us has been so important to me. I’m very happy to show people that it’s worth the fight.”
A hyperreal experience
Artiste Kavya
Artiste Kavya, known for her work as an actor, singer, composer, and producer, is bringing her highly immersive, theatrical audio-visual show to Mumbai on April 17 and 18 at antiSOCIAL, Lower Parel, in advance of her upcoming EP HYPERREAL, set to release in summer 2025. “This tour has challenged me to express my creative greed. Though these are baby steps, I’m picturing it as a musical theatrical production than just pub-gigging,” reveals Kavya. The show will feature Goya on Ableton live, Dhir Mody on drums, and visuals by Moebius (Nikunj Patel). The performance is set to blend released and unreleased tracks, diving into themes of future archaeological discoveries and offering an auditory journey into hyperreality.
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