Mumbai Diary: Sunday Dossier

Pic/Satej Shinde

Don't burst my bubble

Kriti Sanon revisits her childhood at a kids awards show in Goregaon on Saturday. Pic/Satej Shinde

Standing apart

Anmol Malik, Anu Malik's daughter and cousin to musicians Armaan and Amaal, has been singing for a while. And in English. We loved her first song, Let me come home, which released in 2017. The petite songstress has a deep, mellow, sensuous voice that makes you want to listen more.

Pic/Instagram

Interestingly, we discovered that Anmol now wishes to go by the pseudonym, Audrey Piano. She has also started a separate Instagram account where the bio reads: I write. Words. Music. Universes. We wonder if has to do with keeping herself far from the backlash her father faced following #metoo allegations. Or is it because there are too many Maliks, and famous ones, in the industry to stand apart? Whatever it is, we hope she finds her niche.

Love beyond borders

German Ambassador to India, Walter Lindner, may be in Berlin to celebrate Christmas with his family, but his heart is in India. The envoy posted a video on his Twitter account, a compilation of pictures he took in the last eight months after taking charge of the German Embassy in Delhi.

In the 60-second-long video, Lindner shares 60 reasons to visit India. When this diarist spoke to Lindner, asking to share his number one reason, he picked Jaipur. Lindner, who visited Pink City in the first two months of arriving here, took this picture with an elephant. He greets it with his head bowed. "I connected with the elephant; I could feel her wisdom," he tells us.

Pat on the back in India soon?

In a way, Australian pacer Pat Cummins, who was bought for R15.5 crore by the Kolkata Knight Riders at Thursday's Indian Premier League auction, has to underline his worth even before the T20 extravaganza kicks off next year. Cummins is closing in on a 100-wicket milestone in one-day international cricket. He will be up against a tough Indian side whether or not Virat Kohli & Co win today's ODI series decider against the West Indies. Cummins will also have to tackle India's perky wicketkeeper Rishabh Pant, who famously sledged him during the last Border-Gavaskar Trophy series.

A century of wickets will make Cummins the 17th Australian to achieve the feat. Glenn McGrath heads the list of top ODI wicket-takers for Australia with 380 scalps. Cummins has a good chance to claim the remaining four scalps in the next series ODI series in India. The first game of that contest will be held in Mumbai and who can rule out the talented bowler from taking a four-wicket haul first up at the Wankhede Stadium on January 14. After all, he has done so six times in his eight-year career and one cannot imagine the thrill quotient in case Pant becomes his milestone scalp.

Captive in Pakistan

It was exactly a year ago that Mumbai-based techie Hamid Nihal Ansari returned to India, after six years in captivity in a Pakistani jail. He had entered Pakistan to meet a woman he befriended, and fell in love with, on social media. Ansari was tried for espionage, before the late former external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and several other activists, helped him find his way back home. His story of survival and return, will soon be out in an untitled, tell-all book that Hamid has co-written with journalist Geeta Mohan, for Penguin Random House.

Hamid Nihal Ansari and Geeta Mohan

"This story is not the imagination of a writer or poet, it is my true story. That of the life as a prisoner in foreign land. It narrates three stages of struggle and how hard work pays off: mine, my mother's and the family's, and of the people in Pakistan who came forward to help us," shared Ansari of the book, which is slated to release early next year. In a video shared on Twitter, Ansari said of his experience in the bordering country, "[The manner in which] Pakistanis behave with Indians, I wish for that to come before the world." As for Ansari, he is slowly finding his footing, and works as visiting faculty at a junior college in Mumbai.

Kitchen confidential

Masque owner Aditi Dugar has opened a new flavour lab just a stone's throw from the restaurant. It's a space dedicated to culinary experiments. "Considering how often we change the menu driven by seasons, we realised that it was important to have a space for RnD," says Dugar.

Their recent experiment, the Black Project, involved cooking ingredients in their natural sugars at a certain temperature, thereby intensifying the flavours. One dish from the experiment, the black mango, made it to the restaurant's menu. "We want to be able to engage a certain audience that's interested in this journey and take them to our lab for dinner," she says about the space.

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