Mumbai Diary: Wednesday Dossier

Pic/Atul Kamble

Agla station pyaar hai

A couple hugs while waiting for a train at Kurla station on Tuesday

Hong Kong, a click away

A photo Sen took of a CAA protestor, which is on display in Hong Kong

The Hong Kong International Photo Festival is an annual event held in that territory, which is on till November. A number of Indian photographers are being featured this year, including Ronny Sen (in pic) and Kushal Ray. Talking about Portrait of Protest, his series being exhibited, Sen told this diarist, "These are images of various protests that have taken place in India from 2006 to 2020. Among others, they cover the uprisings in Nandigram and Singur, the protests that took place when rationalist thinkers were murdered, the strike at FTII, the movement at JNU when Umar Khalid was first arrested, and the recent CAA protests that rocked the country."

NGO's healthy move

Hemkunt Foundation is a Delhi-based NGO that has started an important initiative. They have launched a mental-health helpline, 9990691313, for people from economically disadvantaged communities who are unable to afford professional help. "I worked a lot during the pandemic and saw how our mental health was affected across the board," shared founder Harteerath Singh, adding that there is a team that caters to the calls, and people can also write in to mentalhealth@hemkuntfoundation.com.

This summit is a matter of pride

On October 29 and 30, consultancy project Pride Circle will hold a virtual conference called the Pride-Ed Summit, which will focus on spotlighting inclusive education opportunities and creating safe spaces for those from the LGBTQiA+ community. The summit invites students, parents, teachers and employers to take part in panel discussions, talks and workshops that highlight topics like inclusion in classrooms and the workplace, queer creative expression and more. "I'll be touching upon the topic of pride at the workplace. India is now facing a situation where there exist generations of queer persons, with old, middle and newer generations who've had different experiences of being queer. I'll be talking about these aspects and will also speak about what corporations can do to make workplaces more inclusive," shared Harish Iyer (in pic), equal rights activist and a speaker at the conference.

The road to crime

You might know him from films like 7 Khoon Maaf and Bombay Velvet. But there is another hat that actor Vivaan Shah dons - that of an author. His first book, Living Hell, was a crime novel that was published in 2019. Now he will launch his second title next month, and it's called Midnight Freeway and this one, too, is a crime thriller. Revealing bits from the storyline, Shah shared, "It's a hard boiled pulp paperback that's about a criminal lawyer who is pathologically incapable of following the law in his day-to-day personal life; a sort of first-person study of a criminally warped mind. It concerns an accident on the Bandra Worli Sea Link. The book belongs to the road noir genre and homage to the crime novels of Jim Thompson and David Goodis, what the French would call ‘noir maudit', which translates roughly to ‘noir of the damned'."

City chef up to something fishy

City-based chef Thomas Zacharias seems to be having the time of his life shooting for his Chef on the Road series in Goa, from where he posts regular updates about the cuisine of the sunshine state. And yesterday, he alerted his followers about a special community of fishermen there, Ramponkars, who use a unique one-km long fishing net called rampor (in pic). It's a much more sustainable way to fish than using trawlers that go deep into the sea, thus harming endangered species like stingrays and sharks. "There are some beautiful lessons to be learnt from the Ramponkars," Zacharias shared.