Slowly, Mumbai city is opening up, inching back to a semblance of its bustling, busy, beloved self, with lessons for
Slowly, Mumbai city is opening up, inching back to a semblance of its bustling, busy, beloved self, with lessons for the future. HT’s photographers scan the usual haunts, to find markets that are bustling, railway stations still deserted, parks and promenades only periodically in use, and the seaside missing its throngs.
In the Crawford Market area, where there’s a corner and a street for everything you could think of, the bustle looks almost completely normal, until you notice the masks (even if most are worn poorly, on the chin).(Bhushan Koyande / HT Photo)
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Azad Maidan is eerily calm on a weekday afternoon. Even the grass is growing untrampled in the monsoon. (Pratik Chogre / HT Photo)
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A few stragglers wait for a bus or rickshaw at the Bandra railway station. Commuting has become both easier and more difficult, as crowds thin but trains remain off limits to most and buses continue to restrict the number of passengers.(Satish Bate / HT Photo)
Beaches and parks are open only for a few hours each day. Social distancing remains in force.(Satish Bate / HT Photo)
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On a Mumbai Metro skywalk, the thinned crowds are in stark contrast with normal rush hour, when the throngs would be a busy blur.(Satish Bate / HT Photo)
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Sheer delight: While out surveying the remote Phoenix Islands Archipelago, Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists captured rare footage of a “glass octopus”, named so because it is completely see-through. What one does see when one shines a light on it is its optic nerve, eyeballs, and digestive tract. Even though this species has been known to science since 1918, scientists were forced to study about this animal through specimens found in the guts of predators, before this sighting.
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Herald / Harbinger is a permanent public art installation by Ben Rubin and Jer Thorp. It broadcasts the sounds of the Bow Glacier cracking and breaking 200 km away, to the centre of Calgary, one of Canada’s largest cities, almost in real time. The sounds and imagery shaped by data from a glacial observatory are broadcast through 16 speakers and seven LED arrays.
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Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): The movie explores the many dimensions of parenthood and love through the story of a Chinese-American immigrant named Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh) who, while struggling to run a failing laundromat business, uses her newfound powers to travel across multiple realities to save the world and work on her strained relationships with her loved ones. It’s a family drama that’s fast-paced, funny and, above all, tackles earnestly the idea of healing from intergenerational trauma.
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At first sight: For centuries, sunspots were thought to be Mercury passing across the Sun. By the early 17th century, with the invention of the telescope, astronomers could get a clearer look. In 1610, Galileo Galilei (who first used the telescope to observe space) in Italy and his British contemporary Thomas Harriot identified these as spots on the Sun. Seen here are 35 drawings of sunspots created by Galileo between June 2 and July 8, 1612.
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Calcutta Houses was initially an Instagram page run by Manish Golder, Sidhartha Hajra and Sayan Dutta. They scoured the city and archived heritage homes, some dating to the early 1800s, others as recent as the Art Deco trend of the 1960s, many that would not be around much longer. Last year they got their first request to document in details a family home that they had featured on their page. Golder has now been commissioned to archive a 200-year-old ancestral home called Barrister Babur Bari (Barrister’s Home; seen here).