25 July,2021 04:25 AM IST | Mumbai | Team mid-day
Pic/Satej Shinde
Against a pile of cars to be scrapped, two young men catch their breath at Kashmira Junction, Mira Road.
Tony Greig. Pic/Getty Images
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The England cricket team have a heavy summer. After hosting New Zealand for a two-Test series which went the visitors' way, their five-Test series against India will begin at Trent Bridge on August 4. The Indian batsmen led by skipper Virat Kohli have tortured sides over the last couple of years, but they will do well to notch up some big runs against Joe Root's team. Probably, this is the English summer which will witness even taller scores by the Indians. If this happens, the runs column in the bowling analysis of the English bowlers won't be pretty just like they were in 1973. We stumbled upon the Lord's Test match scoresheet of that year to notice that Rohan Kanhai's West Indies team massacred the English bowling to score 652-8 declared in their only innings of the game. Kanhai, Garfield Sobers and Bernard Julien carved memorable centuries and all five England bowlers scored âcenturies' Geoff Arnold 0-111, Bob Willis 4-118, exciting all-rounder Tony Greig 3-180, Derek
Underwood 0-105 and captain Ray Illingworth 1-114. No wonder England lost by an innings and 226 runs.
Vibha Batra is on a roll. The author, advertising consultant, poet, lyricist, translator, travel writer, playwright and columnist is on her way to releasing her 18th book. Shortly after her grandfather passed away, she decided to translate his work and began with her favourite - Ishaavaasya Upanishad: Gyan aur Karm - a book that combined philosophy, mysticism, spirituality. The 43-year-old author tells this diarist, "Fourteen years and eighteen books later, I feel beyond excited for my latest release, Pinkoo Shergill Pastry Chef (Scholastic India). The book is very close to my heart (and, erm, tummy). Because, it's about my favourite thing in the world. Food! Dessert! Eating!"
Designer Priyal Turakhia's collection reuses water bottles incorporated with organic cotton from Kutch
How do you bring climate action to fashion? Priyal Turakhia, winner of Fashion Forward Fellowship, has found a way. Her collection, Could Be by Nirantar, reuses water bottles and cosmetic product bottles, incorporating them with hand-woven organic-cotton from Kutch. The designs also take on a zero dyeing approach to address the excessive water-pollution rampant in the fashion industry. Turakhia says it is inspired from the Japanese philosophy of Kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery. "The Fashion Forward Fellowship by YWater and The ReFashion Hub has been a comprehensive learning experience," says Turakhia, who has worked with local artisans in Siliguri, West Bengal to bring her collection to life. "The opportunity to learn from the experience of some great entrepreneurs in the sustainable fashion industry has helped me prepare better for the challenges that lie ahead in starting a sustainable fashion business."
An ambitious initiative by the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI), aptly named FACES, intends to map the facial and occupational diversity across rural India, as well as people like migrant labourers, who are rendered invisible in the urban pockets of the country. The ongoing project aims to document portraits of at least one adult male, one adult female and one child or adolescent - along with their age, occupation and other details - from the 10,000-odd blocks across the 640 districts of India. The attempt is also to gather their personal stories. "A majority of the people in our country work in the unorganised sector, which is extremely unreported, under-recorded and not categorised. So, it was very necessary for us to understand their lives," shared Kanika Gupta, editor of the FACES section.
As the Tokyo Olympic Games are held in the shadow of COVID-19, the mind rolls back to 1994. This diarist was in Hiroshima reporting on the 1994 Asian Games for this paper. The press from different countries were staying at designated press hotels. The chef of the restaurant, where this writer had breakfast daily for the duration of the Games, sent out two Japanese dolls as a farewell gift as the Games ended in October. The silk attire of those dolls has faded with time, one of them is missing an eye, and they look worn out after 27 years. Yet, still preserved by yours truly, they always bring a smile to the face and are a reminder of a chef, who earned a Michelin Star for his kindness.
