12 August,2014 08:22 AM IST | | MiD DAY Correspondent
The city — sliced, diced and served with a dash of sauce
Manjrekar is not losing faith
There's one former cricketer who is not losing patience over Mahendra Singh Dhoni's Indian team Sanjay Manjrekar, who is witnessing the five-match Pataudi Trophy as a television commentator in England. "Can't lose faith in this Ind team.
Sanjay Manjrekar
Its a young inexperienced bunch thats put to a test (overseas) that most Ind teams of past have failed," tweeted Manjrekar recently. Indeed, the former batting stylist was part of Indian teams that rarely won anything abroad.
In fact, during Manjrekar's playing days (1987 to 1996), India won only one overseas Test against Sri Lanka at Colombo's Sinhalese Sports Club in 1993 so the Mumbaikar knows how precious overseas wins are. Hopefully, Dhoni & Co can repay the faith by dishing out a better performance at the Oval from August 15. There's a good patriotic reason for giving of their best on Independence Day.
'Agabai, leopard!'
We are accustomed to the creative excuses that domestic helpers come up with, for not making it to work. My child is ill, my stomach is aching, my bus didn't come...
Illustrations/Amit Bandre
But one colleague who lives in Mulund heard the best one from her domestic helper: "There was a leopard outside my house so I could not come out!" Considering she lives in the area where a leopard did indeed enter someone's house recently, it was not altogether improbable. What next, we say.
Ticking away through the years
This clock has a history that stretches back more than 100 years. From childhood, Vinod Samel had seen this clock on the wall at his Baramati residence. When he moved to Dombivili, he brought the clock with him.
From left, Sanjay Agate, Vinod Samel and Prakash Naik admiring the antique timepiece, which gleams like new after some TLC (tender, loving care). Pic/Shrikant Khuperkar
The venerable timepiece was not working, but Samel could not bring himself to dispose of it to a junk dealer. Instead, he thought of giving it to someone who would be able to repair it and look after it with care.
This idea had taken hold in his mind, when he heard about Sanjay Agate, a Dombivili resident, who likes collecting old things. Agate was the right choice, and by happy coincidence he also knew who could repair the clock.
This was Prakash Naik, also of Dombivili, who has been repairing and restoring clocks for some 40 years. Naik discovered that the clock was indeed more than 100 years old, had been made in New York, by a now-defunct company.
So Naik painstakingly sourced the parts he needed to bring the clock back into ship-shape condition, and not only handed the clock over to Agate in record time, he also took just R 1,100 as the charge for repairing it. The clock needs to be wound once every eight days.
