Mumbai Diary: Friday Dossier

Pic/Ashish Raje

Smoke on the wall

With smoke emerging from burning piles of garbage in the background, children run and play along a wall near Bandra Station

She was simply the best

Sharon Prabhakar; Gary Lawyer (right) Tina Turner. Pic Courtesy/Instagram

America might be a democracy, but for a good part of her 83 years, Tina Turner was its undisputed queen of music. The icon who passed away after a long illness on Wednesday was a 12-time Grammy Award-winner boasting fans including Mick Jagger, David Bowie and Madonna. "An icon," singer Sharon Prabhakar called her. "Tina Turner survived the worst kind of domestic abuse and continued to maximise her potential.

And she looked so good on stage!" the artiste pointed out. While Prabhakar could not get enough of What's love got to do with it, Gary Lawyer has a bias to Proud Mary. "She was a trailblazer, and an original. If you wanted a great show, you saw Tina Turner," he recalled paying tribute. And while singer Aditi Ramesh (below) did not share the generational connect as Lawyer or Prabhakar, she remarked, "Her vocal style and tone, especially in the mid-range with its growly feels, were fantastic. She was a performer; I remember watching this surreal 1970s film, Tommy, where she played Acid Queen," she shared.

What's there in the back?

Anaconda. PIC COURTESY/GOPAL MS

When KK Muralidharan (inset) founded the hashtag, BombayBacklot, he wanted to offer people an alternative viewpoint. "As a production designer, I am constantly on the sets and keep wondering how people miss out on what happens in the background. There are so many people and objects involved on the sets." His posts draw our attention to someone napping on the sets, a workday lunch, breaks, faces and other snippets from a studio floor. Recently, adding to the hashtag, Gopal MS, founder of @mumbai- paused, posted a picture of Anaconda. Not a reptile and entirely manmade, this species of tubes snakes across a shooting set, reaching the currents of cool air from air conditioners to people. "I thought it's the perfect fit for Muralidharan's series. These long cloth tunnels are an integral part of sets and give people a peek into what's beyond the foreground." A nice spin on BTS, we say.

Making a big whoosh of air

Education officer DS Dharmik teaches children to make glider paper planes

As a child, did you imagine the hum and unmusical roar of an aeroplane when a paper plane cut through the air? Today, on National Paper Airplane Day, Dr Rajkumar S Pant, a professor of aerospace engineering, will deliver a lecture on the principles of flight at the Nehru Science Centre in Worli. Pant hopes to encourage kids to imagine that hum in a paper plane while not losing sight of the mechanisms of lift force. "Often, people use [Daniel] Bernoulli's Principle to explain how lift is generated. But they apply it incorrectly. Such faulty reasoning is propagated through children's science books and popular websites. My lecture and demonstration will clear these misconceptions and offer a comprehensive explanation of lift generation. I will take attendees through aircraft components and explain each of their functions," the professor from IIT, Bombay, said. The lecture is open to students from grade eight and above. Interested folks can check @nehrusciencentremumbai on Instagram to register.

Courting love, money and crime

Jumma Khan in a moment from the film

A screening of the documentary film, Partners in Crime, next week will try to throw light upon the question, "Who owns art?". Directed by Paromita Vohra (below), who runs Parodevi Pictures, the film - among other things - traverses the incredible and unknown journey of the song, Munni badnaam hui, from small town streets to a Bollywood film, and highlights the beginnings of Mumbai's metal scene. In addition to these, Vohra wouldn't want the audience to miss "the connections between ethics in love and ethics in art."

She noted, "In a time when we work with so much referencing and remixing of existing media and also share our art and ideas on social media, there is a lot of talk about law - but not enough about ethics. And as Bob Dylan wrote - ‘To live outside the law, you must be honest'. The digital era allows a greater place to experiment and express but it also requires the audience and the community of creators to act with greater love and honesty towards artists and support their work ethically."