The city - sliced, diced and served with a dash of sauce
Pic/Kirti Surve Parade
In Living Colour
A technician adjusts the lights in the foreground of a colourful tent at the Konkan Festival that was held at Shivaji Park in Dadar.
From Russia, with love
Ambi Subramaniam in performance on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow during the BraVo awards ceremony. Pics Courtesy/Ambi Subramaniam
How do you get to the Bolshoi Theatre? Ask Ambi Subramaniam for a start. The musician was presented with the award for Best Musician from a Partner Country at the BraVo awards in Moscow on April 15. “The BraVo is very much like the Grammys for Russia,” shared Subramaniam, who also performed alongside the famous Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra on the stage of the iconic Bolshoi Theatre. “My dad [L Subramaniam] performed here in the 1980s, and still talks about it. The last few years I visited Moscow, I had seen the theatre as a tourist. To be on stage was quite surreal,” the 33-year-old admitted. The performance itself was a leaf out of his father’s playbook. “I performed my father’s composition, The Flight of the Humble Bee, to add a dash of Indian style to the proceedings,” he shared.
Nas vibe in Dharavi
MC Heam (left) in conversation with Nas. Pics Courtesy/MC Heam
Children at The Dharavi Dream Project (TDDP) were met with a groovy surprise last weekend when American rapper Nasir Jones aka Nas dropped by the hip-hop school to meet young artistes. “It was a totally unplanned meet-up. He [Nas] really wanted to see what we were doing at the school, especially since street hip-hop culture was where he started. Seeing the performances, he shared how he was reminded of his own childhood,” Hemant Dhyani aka MC Heam, mentor, told this diarist.
Tall tales from Mumbai to Dhaka
A view of the exhibition Transactional Objects, Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty’s work at the Venice Biennale 2015. Pics Courtesy/Bard Studios
The more cities grow, the more they look the same it seems. City architects and researchers Rupali Gupte (left, below) and Prasad Shetty’s (right, below) semi-fictional essay, The Dermosonic Machine finds a space in Dhaka-based artist Munem Wasif’s book, Kromosho that was released on April 18. The book is Wasif’s immersive approach to image making shaped by the slow evolution of a city, with a lens on Dhaka itself.
Gupte and Shetty’s essay centres on an old technician living in the inner city of Mumbai. “We [Prasad and I] had recently given a talk about the urban form of Mumbai in Dhaka. We have been researching on the subject, and how the older form of the city, one that has been settled over the years, has nurtured its transactional abilities. One example is the little one-foot city store that builds kinships through transactional objects and becomes the eye on the street,” Gupte told this diarist.
Saving the taar shehnai
The twin taar shehnais. Pics Courtesy/Film Heritage Foundation
Nothing beats a classic. Early last week, Film Heritage Foundation in Mumbai received a special gift in the form of the late Dakshina Mohan Tagore’s taar shehnai. The instrument was donated by his grandson, Aditya Tagore. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, founder and director, Film Heritage Foundation, said, “Dakshina Mohan Tagore (inset) invented the new instrument — a combination of the dilruba and the shehnai. These two dilrubas with an attachment of shehnai are extremely rare.”
It was the sound of this rare instrument that piqued the interest of the legendary director Satyajit Ray. Dungarpur said, “Ray found Tagore in Calcutta, and had requested him to play the instrument for his films, Pather Panchali and Jalsaghar. The sound is prominent when Durga dies in the film.” He added, “Tagore was lovingly called Dukhi Dada, because he used to play sad songs beautifully on the instrument.” Dungarpur added, “I am so delighted and touched that somebody who played in such important films of Ray; his instrument is donated to the foundation.”
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