MUMBAI: A few days before Ramzan Eid, Shaheen Jamadar’s phone started buzzing non-stop. A bunch of people from Dharavi were calling up to inquire where she had disappeared. It was festival time and they needed rations and clothes that she had been organising for them through an NGO ever since the lockdown began.
Jamadar, 38, had tested positive for Covid and had been hospitalised 12 days ago. But the fact that people wouldn’t be able to celebrate Eid kept gnawing at her and she got to work from her hospital bed. When the moon was sighted on Thursday night, ration kits had already reached the 170 families that had approached Jamadar for help.
Mriga Kapadiya and Amrit Kumar are the founders of
, a New Delhiâbased label that merges traditional Indian crafts and textiles with streetwear silhouettes. The brand also functions as a creative platform for POC voices and offers design and diversity consultation.
On a warm afternoon in March, after sharing a delicious spread of Kashmiri goodies and pani puri, we cut a buttercream cake in our New Delhi studio. We were saying goodbye to our studio manager, a rock who had kept our team laughing for years. It was bittersweet to see her leaveâshe was moving to Mumbai, about to get married, and giddy with excitement. Afterwards, the two of us sat down with our little chai cups filled to the brim to discuss how cute our team was, and finalize plans for NorBlack NorWhiteâs 11th birthday sale on April 20.
On April 25, 2021, when the world woke up to a chilling front page in the
New York Times, blazing with an image of mass funerals in a cremation ground in Delhi, Mumbai-based baker-food stylist-recipe developer Neysa Mendes felt as overwhelmed as most other doomscrollers. “I was feeling a mix of anger and despair at the devastating situation. I knew I needed to do something and this [baking] is what I knew how to do,” says the petite 37-year-old home chef, who decided to use her influence (and skills) to bake for a COVID fundraiser earlier this week.
What started as a personal contribution to help India’s crumbling healthcare transformed into a bake sale campaign that has so far united a cohort of bakers and home chefs from Mumbai, Pune, Chennai and Jaipur. “My idea was to donate 100 per cent of the sales to a verified charity and have transparency by posting a donation slip confirming the same,” says Mendes, popularly known as @goodslice on Instagram, who set up basic gu