Mumbai Diary: Monday Dossier

Pic/Sayyed Sameer Abedi

Taken for a ride

A trolley bag plays the role of a vehicle carrying two children outside Vidyavihar station.

These songs of freedom

This weekend marked 300 days of activist Umar Khalid being put behind bars under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) in the Delhi riots case. An event called Lyrics of Liberty was held to mark the occasion, and also pay tribute to Father Stan Swamy, who passed away last week. It featured protest poetry and songs, with a line-up that included actor Danish Husain and theatre personality Quasar Thakore Padamsee, who recited a poem by Roque Dalton Garcia, an El Salvadorian poet who was killed by the oppressive regime in that country. "It's important to understand that UAPA is not new. It's a fascist playbook that has been going on for hundreds of years to silence people's voices," Padamsee said.

Looking at the North-East

Amid all the despair that we've seen in the past year, the situation in the Northeast has been under-reported. The Zubaan-Sasakawa Peace Foundation Grants for Young Researchers from the North-East hopes to make a difference, and is thus inviting scholars, writers and photographers from states in the region to capture the multiple narratives of how the pandemic was experienced there. Proposals for A Year of Loss And Resilience can be sent to projects@zubaanbooks.com by July 15.

Restaurant body's app-t response

We had carried a report in this page last week, which spoke about how the National Restaurants Association of India (NRAI) had filed a complaint with the Competitions Commission of India against the alleged malpractices of food delivery aggregators Zomato and Swiggy, such as indiscriminate commissions and enforced discounting. The two sides have been in a tussle for over a year now, with no resolution in sight, and a recent online report stated that NRAI was planning to launch its own food delivery app soon. The report billed this app as a direct competitor to Zomato and Swiggy. But when we reached out to Anurag Katriar, the association's president, for a confirmation, he clarified that the news was premature. The food delivery app is indeed in the works, but it will take time. Meanwhile, NRAI is working on a different loyalty app. "It will be an industry-wide app that will reward people for dining at various restaurants," Katriar told this diarist.

Messing up the burger

After extending the footprint of Farzi Cafe - one of its signature franchises apart from Masala Library and multiple others - to Canada, the ninth country to have a Farzi Cafe outlet, Massive Restaurants have now announced the launch of a new chain called Louis Burger. It will soon open outlets in Delhi and Mumbai. Its founder Zorawar Kalra shared, "Louis Burger is a virtual burger restaurant with a single focus - to create a true burger experience for India. It will have messy burgers with fine ingredients, and is named after Louis Lassen, the inventor of the original hamburger. The project has been in the works for years, but extensive work started in the last lockdown and after multiple trials, we have finally reached a level where all the ingredients talk to each other."

Playing the sweet notes of chocolate

Parth Chandramani (left) and Vinesh Johny make the chocolate flute

Last week, on World Chocolate Day, Bengaluru-based chef Vinesh Johny teamed up with flautist Parth Chandramani to create a one-of-a-kind edible, yet functional, chocolate flute. "It all started with Vinesh watching a few of my YouTube videos and proceeding to get in touch with me to try and make this chocolate flute. When he proposed the idea, I was sure we'd be able to get some kind of sound out of it; the challenge was to get music because when you think of a flute, you think of music, not just sounds," said Chandramani. The flute took about 10 days to create, keeping the physics of the medium of chocolate in mind. "We had to think of things like body temperature because the minute you touch chocolate it begins to melt away," he added. Head over to @vineshjohny on Instagram, for a chocolate-y rendition of the popular song Urvasi, Urvasi. This, also, is a perfect example of how you can hear your song and eat it too.