Mumbai Diary: Friday Dossier

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

Hancock’s letter

Herbie Hancock (left) and Louiz Banks

Herbie Hancock is not just one of the most legendary names in the history of jazz music, but he also has a strong India connection. The pianist has played multiple times in the country, including with Ustad Zakir Hussain in a memorable concert in Delhi in 2009, which was dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. But local jazz maestro Louiz Banks’s son, Neil, revealed to this diarist of another India association; this has a Mumbai link. Hancock is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and organises International Jazz Day annually on April 30. The older Banks started the event’s Mumbai chapter, and Hancock would thus send him a letter of appreciation ever year, till he started sending the same to Neil after he took over the organisational duties five years ago. This year’s letter reveals how Jazz Day events were celebrated in 192 countries, and addressed issues including gender equality and sustainable development. Neil shared, “He started the initiative to promote peace and harmony, and help cut off racism from the world.” 

The creamy layer of advertising

Some things never grow old, and some people — like the Amul girl — don’t either. A talk tomorrow with the three creators behind the iconic advertising campaign since 1993 — Rahul da Cunha, Manish Jhaveri and illustrator Jayant Rane — will celebrate its lasting legacy. We asked da Cunha to name one of his favourite hoardings, and he told us about the one in the photo alongside. “It was during the 1996 World Cup and it was getting to me how India had become a one-man team,” he shared about the genesis of the ad based, of course, on The Little Master. 

Nostalgic return

Pooja Dhingra went back to the basics during the pandemic. The chef suffered a business loss in April last year when she had to shut down Colaba’s Le 15 Café, her labour of love. But she took solace in this period from reigniting her love for baking, relying on nostalgia to attempt simple dishes, necessitated by a shortage of ingredients. Those recipes have now found their way to her new book,  Coming Home. They include classics like éclairs and gajar halwa, and Dhingra shared, “These recipes helped me see the light at the end of the tunnel.”   

No need to pardon their French

Here’s a chance for Mumbai to flaunt its French connections. Every year, all the Alliance Francaise branches across the world host a quiz for their students, which are first conducted at a local, then national, and then international level. Alliance Francaise de Bombay, which Stéphane Doutrelant is the director of, is representing the city, while there are 13 other outlets in India. “We have registered participants [for the Mumbai branch] of whom two will progress to the national round,” shared Siddharth Bhatia, cultural coordinator for the Mumbai branch. Two national winners will then face their global counterparts in the virtual competition. “This is one of the several events that the network of Alliance Francaises in India has been organising to promote Indo-French cooperation,” Bhatt 
added. Well, we just hope that at the end of it, Mumbai earns the bragging rights.   

There’s a Mumbai link with LV 

The Cave by Nuru Karim

To mark the 200th birthday of the founder of the Louis Vuitton brand on August 4, 200 visionaries from across the globe and diverse disciplines created a design vision that re-imagines the iconic Louis Vuitton trunk. These include rapper Drake, designer Marc Jacobs, and our very own Mumbai architect Nuru Karim. “It is an honour to be invited to contribute to this project — in addition to LV being a very influential brand, I was also drawn to the project’s philanthropic nature. The trunks will be rotated across the brand’s 200 stores internationally, and eventually be auctioned to raise money for charitable causes,” Karim told this diarist. His interpretation, titled The Cave, is based on a dynamic void that is constantly growing and re-constructing in space and time. The iconic chequered pattern is envisioned in a constant state of flux, continually mutating to create a balance between the material/spiritual, solid/void, being/nothingness, permanence/change, and past/future.

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