04 November,2022 06:49 AM IST | Mumbai | Team mid-day
Pic/Sameer Markande
On a hot November day, a young man cools off at Banganga in Walkeshwar
Tejas Menon. Pic Courtesy/Anuj Mehta
Music fans woke up with a start on Thursday with the release of the line-up for the debut Lollapalooza festival in the city in January 2023. While fans were divided between the listing of The Strokes, The Imagine Dragons and Japanese Breakfast, they also noticed that artiste Tejas Menon will be joining these bands on the big stage. "To have something in Mumbai is always cool. The festivals outside the city have their own charm, but Lollapalooza is different," said Menon. Excited about the upcoming diverse soundscape, Menon added that attending a fest like Lollapalooza is all about soaking in the experience. "It is a bonus that I get to catch stuff while I am working. I hope people who will be coming to the festival will pick a band they really want to see and just enjoy its vibe." With tickets getting sold out rather quickly, fans might need to hurry to not miss this one-of-its-kind chance.
A moment from the film, Julie & Julia; (right) Julia Powell. Pic Courtesy/IMDB.COM, Getty Images
For those of us who swear by the cliché that food heals, watching Julie Powell (played by Amy Adams) cook through American TV chef Julia Child's book in the 2009 film Julie & Julia was a therapeutic validation. Powell had in 2002 tasked herself to cook all the 500-plus recipes in the book within a year to distract herself from her day job. As news of her death due to a heart attack made the rounds, tributes flooded in.
Author and culinary chronicler Rushina Munshaw-Ghildiyal (inset) shared how Powell inspired many bloggers. "I was so sorry to hear of her passing! Her project not only brought Child into relevance to a whole new generation, but also inspired scores of food bloggers to emulate her for similar social media projects of cooks including Dorie Greenspan, Ina Garten, Deb Perelman and Alison Roman. Here, in India, I remember Preeti Deo, author of Paat Paani, had decided to cook her way through the Marathi cookbook, Ruchira," she reminisced.
This diarist recently learnt that Khar-based Japanese restaurant Mizu is preparing for their upcoming four-day pop-up at The Conservatory in Bengaluru. When we reached out to its head chef and owner Lakhan Jethani, he shared, "I am really excited about taking our food to Bengaluru, as the city has an open food culture. Among all the other dishes on their menu, I hope diners taste our shio kombu and dashi caramel mushrooms. It is made with fresh shiitake, shimeji, local portobello steamed in a butter made out of dashi caramel and sea algae, and is topped with peanuts and noori furikake."
The Bombay Reading Room - a sizeable chunk of the Urbs Indis Library that is currently on tactile display at Arthshila Ahmedabad until November 13 - features more than 3,000 years of books and archival material. The assemblage has been curated by architect Robert Stephens who cultivated a passion for rare books about Mumbai soon after moving to the city in 2007 from South Carolina in USA. Stephens shared with this diarist that the smallest book in the collection is V for victory (see right), a handbook for allied soldiers stationed in Bombay during World War II. "For lovers of sewage history, nearly a dozen books wade deep into the city's sanitary past. Several publications shine a light on the city's wide urban planning history, while others dive into microscopic details like railway networks, road master plans and general visions for a more livable Mumbai and her millions of residents," he revealed.
