the sunday in pictures – train / meha / midsummer nights dream / bluefrog / omlette pav

after a long time in a local train makes you romanticize the green seats, the dangling handles, the sunlight in your eyes, and even the terrible wave like grills in the windows.

at kuntals house meha told us a long story of anmals with daadi and mooch having a bath and being wiped by napkins.

at marine drive, new rides for the pleasure of the tourists - flowers and lights on the ghoda gaadi with dard-e-disco shahrukh on the back and poor kids pushing rich kids around th parking lot in mini cars.

the midsummer nights dream production at jamshed bhabha auditorium was perhaps overrated and oversized but still fun. malkhamb acrobats spout shakespeare in tamil, hindi, marathi, bengali and even sinhalese with a little english thrown in. a much venerated language disintegrates into the cadences and rhythms of accents from the subcontinent as the story is told through intense physicality. actors disappear into the scaffolding to the back, rise in red ribbons and skip and get entangled in webs spun by a bawdy puck across the sand pit of a stage. mining the exotic, making the alien stranger by making it purely about form, problematic the politics of the play were – but i can imagine having a terrific time with the bollywood over the topness in birmingham or new jersey.

a jazz concert by a dutch flamenco funk jazz band at the new swanky ‘blue frog’. kapil regurgitates currently vogue biomorphic razzmatazz as a landscape of seating pods overlooking a dancefloor and stage. the old mill land north light roof truss now flickers with computer generated animation of daisies and little girls turning nuclear bombs into trees. the sustainability message perhaps does not really extend to the working mill across the yard that might soon be replaced by another night club. silly regressive me and my cynicism. great scale of the space though. and very cool.

but the omlette pav at santacruz was divine- and at one tenth the price of the burger at the frog.