Mumbai Diary: Sunday Dossier

The city - sliced, diced and served with a dash of sauce.

Mumbai Diary: Sunday Dossier

Shatrugan Sinha with Yashwant Sinha at CCA press meet

What's your stand?

Actor and Lok Sabha member Shatrughan Sinha holds the door for former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha at an anti-CAA press meet at the Press Club of Mumbai on Saturday. Pic /Suresh Karkera

Aussies needed more, but Englishmen said no

Former England batsman and manager Ken Barrington. Pic/Getty Images

Trust the Australians to come up with cricket innovations which they pioneer and perfect from
time to time.

At the moment, they are pushing for four-day Test cricket which their arch-rivals England already tried out last summer. Meanwhile, our in-house cricket nut stumbled upon a 40-year news report in the January 6, 1980 Sportsweek magazine which projected how the Australians wanted to introduce three on-field umpires in Test cricket. The reason for the proposed addition was that one umpire could get a rest in each session after the Australians and Englishmen (the second touring team after the West Indies in that Australian summer of 1979-80) complained of poor umpiring standards.

The January 6, 1980, news article in Sportsweek magazine

The third Test umpire plan did not come to fruition and England's influential and Test-experienced team manager Ken Barrington was certainly not a backer of it. Little did Barrington (who passed away the following year while on tour with Ian Botham's England team in the West Indies) envisage in 1980 that there would come a time when an international cricket match would involve four umpires—two on-field, one TV umpire and a reserve umpire apart from the match referee. Of course, he was alive when Sunil Gavaskar walked off at the Melbourne Cricket Ground that same year following an Australian umpire's howler.

An author discovers a poet

Kanishka Gupta and Keshava Guha

It was only in November last year that historian Ramchandra Guha's writer son Keshava Guha wowed us with his debut, Accidental Magic. Not known to many, Keshava is also commissioning editor with Juggernaut Books. And we hear, that he has already got his first acquisition, which is a debut poetry collection by literary agent Kanishka Gupta. It's also the first time that Juggernaut, since its launch in 2015, is publishing poetry. "Many readers will be struck first by Kanishka's shocking, even outrageous honesty. As a portrait of asexuality, you will have encountered nothing like it, anywhere. But there is also a powerful humanity to his work, and savage irony. He writes in a contemporary Indian register that is utterly free of deference—to the West or to the past," Guha said of Gupta's collection, which will release later this year.

Raising the bar

It's a proud moment for the state as Mumbai boys Aadhyaan Desai and Mann Kothari have ranked first and second respectively at the 28th Sub Junior Artistic Gymnastics National Championship 2019 (U-12) held in Jodhpur. The event took place after a gap of four years, and this is the first time that budding gymnasts from Maharashtra have bagged top honours. "I'd practice at least 30 hours a week and keep doing the same move until I got it right," says Desai. Both agree that competition is stiff at the national level. "The tough part is performing elegantly, which requires extreme flexibility and strength," Kothari adds.

Running diplomacy

When this diarist met the Consul General of Poland in Mumbai, Damian Irzyk, last week, they almost immediately got down to business—devouring authentic Italian food. Irzyk, who assumed the post in May 2018, also revealed his love for impromptu runs in the city. An ardent runner, Irzyk in 2005 and 2006 completed the Cracovia Marathon, and the Warsaw Half Marathon in 2006 and 2018. He will now be running the 21K at the Tata Mumbai Marathon. "On some weekends, I take the local train from my home in Haji Ali to Borivli from where I take an auto to Sanjay Gandhi National Park and go for long runs. I love running, always have, and want to continue it while I am here," he shares.

#InLifeAndInDeath

Natashja Rathore with her grandfather. Pic/ Instagram

Actor Rytasha Rathore and his sister, creative producer Natashja Rathore, found a unique way of bidding their grandfather, Dr Dayanand Hargovindas Rathod, who passed away on January 1, farewell. They chronicled his last moments, as well as some memories, on their Instagram accounts. And they were not fazed by the criticism they faced from trolls, asking them instead to mind their own business. If one post was of the electric crematorium with a caption that said "Aum Namah Shivaya", another had Ryatsha holding her grandfather's head smiling at the camera with glistening eyes.
Well, all we can say is that we all grieve differently, and we wish the sisters peace through the difficult period.

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