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.