At least 40 teams from Mumbai are participating in the upcoming Nazir Hoosein Memorial Drive. This Drive pays homage to the founder of the fabled Himalayan Rally, the late Nazir Hoosein. The Nazir Hoosein Memorial Drive will aptly re-trace the route of the 1981 Himalayan Rally, kicking off on November 8 from New Delhi and going on till November 12, exactly 40 years after the 1981 event. More than 90 teams will be participating, out of which the 40 teams based in Mumbai were present at a ceremonial flag off on October 30 evening. The choice of location was the iconic Liberty theatre, owned by the late, grand old man, Nazir Hoosein himself.

Rainbow

The venue is a Mumbai landmark. Today, it is one of the few single-screen theatres standing defiantly in a landscape overrun by multiplex cinemas. The Liberty theatre also hosts the Kashish film festival, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) film fest that has become a looked forward to fixture on the city’s Queer calendar. The rainbow flag, symbol of diversity synonymous with gay events, flies at Liberty theatre when the fest is on (it has been held virtually in COVID times). Kashish was part of Hoosein’s “reinvention” of Liberty, as he himself had said in 2015, to this paper.