BOMBAY TALKIES

There’s no place else where you can dream with your eyes open than in the City of Dreams. Resilience, adjustment and acceptance, this year’s rising talents and fashion front benchers, actors Mrunal Thakur and Vijay Varma, recount their own Maximum City tales with a defunct vintage Mumbai cinema as the backdrop

- MEHERNAAZ DHONDY

IT'S ALL CONNECTED

Sometimes, it's convenient to string together a sequence of events and pin it down to coincidence, but on the odd occasion, like in the case of Mrunal Thakur's career, it's just six degrees of separation. We're on a Zoom call with the actor a couple of days prior to our February cover shoot - the issue is an ode to our love for the city of Mumbai - and Thakur is itching to get her story on the road.

She's almost a Mumbaikar, having moved here when she was in the 11th grade; the initial small-town girl in the big-bad-metropolis issues have subsided, and the city now feels like home. But Thakur's discovery of Mumbai began long back, when she worked on projects for her Bachelor of Mass Media (BMM) degree while at KC College.

One of these assignments took her to the bylanes of Kamathipura in Grant Road. "It's when I decided I would someday do something for the girls back there," says Thakur. As it played out, her first feature film release was Freida Pinto, Manoj Bajpayee, Rajkummar Rao starrer Love Sonia, Tabrez Noorani's debut directorial drama based on sex trafficking in Mumbai.