Wednesday 7 May 2008

Joshua's Mumbai

My friend Rakesh was so inspired by my post on Ballard Estate, or so I would like to fancy, that he travelled all the way from faraway Mira Road where he lives, to South Mumbai and took some fantastic photographs of a few of the heritage buildings there. With his permission, I am providing here the link for you to view these nice pictures.

Rakesh, by the way, is quite normal, compared to some of my other friends who have populated these blog posts off and on. Granted, there was that brief period in early 1990s when he declared undying allegiance to the state of Israel and started calling himself Joshua. That was when he went to the Israeli consulate in Nariman Point and requested that he be recruited to the Mossad, the national intelligence agency of Israel. The deputy attaché or whoever it was that met him, discreetly pressed the buzzer underneath his desk signalling the infiltration of a raving lunatic into the consulate premises. The security, with admirable panache and with a kind but firm hand on my friend’s shoulder, escorted him out with no untoward incident.

Surely you would agree these are minor youthful transgressions and something to be glossed over.

To come back to Rakesh of the present: Rakesh hates multiplexes and is of the opinion that they have ruined the cinema-going experience forever with their fancy seats, fancy crowds, and fancy pricing. So he visits only single-screen cinemas like Regal or New Empire in South Mumbai.

My friend is also quite an aficionado of Kingfisher beer and can tip back quite a few pints of the bubbly golden yellow elixir in the company of close friends, yours truly included.

So now you have an idea of how these photographs came about which were taken over a span of several months, several Sundays to be exact. Rakesh lands up in South Mumbai on a Sunday afternoon, catches a movie in Regal or Eros or wherever, knocks back couple of beers in Leopold in Colaba and starts walking the streets, clicking away merrily.

Almost a perfect Sunday that.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I delurk again, to tell you that I loved this post:-)

Rada said...

Shal!

All I can say is, delurk more often! :-)

Anonymous said...

I couldn't find a comments section on Joshua's site so I'll put in my bit here: Great photographs! Mossad's loss was Mumbai's gain. :-) Joshua, you should consider blogging as well - with text and with pictures.

Rada said...

IS,

Being the retiring sort of fellow he is, Joshua was deeply embarrassed when he knew I was going to write about him.
I don't know whether he will visit the comments section of this post, but surely I will convey your appreciation to him!

Anonymous said...

ideasmith, glad that you liked the pictures. my site is still not set up completely. hopefully, i will have more pictures and a comments page in the near future.

rada, my computer monitor lost its blue & green signals and turned red with embarrassment on displaying the nice things you wrote about me. thanks, guv.

Unknown said...

Talking of beer, I still remember my first beer ever-purchased gracioulsly for me by my dear cousin Rada (kettetan) and Srini in Vile Parle. They used to pull my leg a lot.

We do get Kingfisher beer here in Florida and I occasionally have it and it's a hit with all my American and other friends.

American beers suck,.......

Ravi

Unknown said...

The independent cinema is a lost cause now. My best memories of Indian theaters in Bombay was that the samosas for example tasted better IN THERE than out :-).

We usually go to a huge movieplex called MUVICO in Boca Raton, FL. the experience while stimulating to the senses cannot be compared to Bombay and the comments from all over the place.

Free Guestmap from Bravenet.comFree Guestmap from Bravenet.com
IndiBlogger - Where Indian Blogs Meet
Visit blogadda.com to discover Indian blogs
Add to Technorati Favorites
Subscribe with Bloglines
Creative Commons License
Stepping Sideways... by K. Radhakrishnan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.