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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Modus Vivendi (1000 people – 1000 Homes), 2000: In this self-portrait, a work of mixed media on canvas, Kallat appears as a swaggering, bespectacled juggler of heart and brain. The painting is an exploration of selfhood in the city of Mumbai, where he grew up and lives. The individual, lost in the multitudes, wanders in a state of perpetual disorientation, as reflected in the work. The radiating streaks of red, orange and green, reminiscent of thermal imagery, were achieved by texturing the canvas with layers of paint or canvas and then peeling off some parts to attain the desired visual effect.
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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.
