What: Buy LP players on www.saregama.com, email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , start at Rs 9,500, free shipping, delivery in three weeks.

Why: This week’s cool find comes from an unlikely place - Sa Re Ga Ma. Scratch that! On the music company's website, bpb found for sale LP players and turn tables by Lenco with USB slots and one year warranties. If you have the cash, this one’s a catch.

When: You need a new vintage point.

Join the bpb office - along with Bono, Lana Del Ray and Michelle Branch - to sing for KP, today's birthday girl and our favorite Secret Scouter. Much love and music ~

Download the podcast or hear online here.

Happy Birthday, Beautiful - Innocence Mission
You Are My Joy - Reindeer Section
Everywhere - Michelle Branch
Somebody That I Used To Know - Gotye featuring Kimbra
We Don't Eat - James Vincent McMorrow
Stuck In A Moment - U2
Video Games - Lana Del Rey
Against the Grain - Hudson
Satyameva Jayathe - Superheavy
Bella - Angus & Julia Stone

Have a favourite song? Send us your recommendations to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and if we love them, we’ll add them to next month’s track record!

What: Dial-a-masseuse from the Victoria Memorial School for the Blind, Tardeo, to make an appointment call 23531236, Rs 250 for a half hour and Rs 450 for a one hour foot massage.

Why: Considering all the debauched parties that your legs were photographed at last December, we think they could do with some good press. Call The Victoria Memorial School for the Blind that sends visually impaired foot reflexology specialists to your home, creating a spa experience that levitates somewhere between basic maalishwallah and fancy masseuse. They’re super skilled, not to mention reasonably priced.

When: Feet and greet from Monday to Sunday, appointments must be made a day in advance between Monday to Friday from 11 am to 5 pm.

What: BooksOnToast book drive, drop off points at Thane, Bandra (W), Bandra (E), Andheri (W), Dadar, Flora Fountain, Chembur, Juhu and Pune; email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it   for exact addresses; book sale at Candies in Bandra (W), all titles for under Rs 150.

Why: Drowning in words, wading through pages, trying to cut down to 140 characters? This book drive is your chance to get rid of your excess books, all of which will be sold at a special sale at Candies. Proceeds will go to Hamara Footpath, an NGO that works with street kids. If you’re looking to pad up your reading list, stop by the sale for titles at deep discounts, including children's books, old Naipaul, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and a collection of graphic novels. Plotted cream!

When: Book drive on until January 18; Candies sale on January 22 and 23.

What: The Music Bay, Satyam building, ground floor, opposite BP Petrol Pump, Juhu Tara Road, call 9819982662 or view the Facebook group here, Rs 3,800 for a beginner’s acoustic guitar.

Why: The coolest thing about this new instrument shop is their own brand of guitars, cheaper and better than many instruments on the market. Also on offer are Ratpro, Dean and Fender electric guitars, NUX amplifiers, accessories like 3-in-1 auto tuners and pure leather guitar straps. Pay special attention to Djembe drums, first in a range of exotic instruments from all over the world. The Music Bay also holds basic guitar classes four times a month.

When: You want to be a strum dog millionaire.

Melting candy, unbalanced hearts, yards and yards and yards of discarded gift paper: maybe we have the holidays on our brain, but Indian Mylar Vision, a yet-to-open exhibit by German artist Anselm Reyle, reminds us of the end of Christmas.

A Brush with Berlin

Showing in India for the first time, Reyle’s art is housed at Galerie Isa, a 2,000 square-feet, split level gallery at the Great Western Building that launches this weekend. According to gallery director and art collector Ashwin Thadani, Galerie Isa will focus exclusively on contemporary art by established international artists - after Reyle, the he plans to showcase works of Puerto Rican visual artist Angel Otero.

Wrap Your Head Around This

The gallery’s wide, whitewashed walls and soaring ceilings are a perfect backdrop for Reyle’s huge works, the bulk of which are crafted out of shimmering sheets of artfully crumpled foil, which seem to have been rescued from under a gift-laden tree and pinned against purple and blue backgrounds, juxtaposed with neon lights, preserved behind thick panes of glass.

The melancholia of a party's end is also echoed in a porcelain sculpture made entirely from Messien cups, white, gold and melting into each other, and huge canvasses streaked with sugar-sweet shades of blue, pink and yellow, reminiscent of disintegrating candy canes. These colours appear again in the Drawing By Number series, dripping over dolphins and horses and pandas but refusing to stay within their boundaries.

Novel Ideas

“I want to live inside that,” one of us Scouters thought when we saw a large frame of undulating foil, as shiny and blue and absorbing as the long twilights of the summer solstice that Joan Didion describes in her new memoir Blue Nights. But on our way out, we were offered another perspective of the same universe, a translucent, turquoise block that a pair of hands was desperately trying to break open from the inside. It made us glad for the strong afternoon sunshine. 

Getting there: Galerie Isa, 132, Great Western Building, first floor, opposite Lion Gate Clock Tower, Fort, call 66373432 or visit www.galerieisa.com, opens Saturday, December 17.

A Bug in a Hug

A couple  of days ago, Anisha Sharma, a public relations professional at the NCPA and  @Ghaatidancer to her over 3,000 Twitter followers, was in a really good mood. So she decided, quite literally, to give Mumbai a hug.

Thus began "Ghaatikijhappi" or more officially, Free Hugs campaign, where she along with volunteers will congregate on Carter Road, Bandra at 5:30 pm on December 10 to dole out free hugs to anyone who might want them. They're even planning on having banners and, of course, someone to take a video of the whole event. "Response has been tremendous," Anisha tells us. "In the first day alone, we had over thirty volunteers."

We Don't Knead No Education

Indeed, Anisha managed to compete with all the Kapil Sibal chatter on Twitter yesterday to flood timelines and garner an impressive amount of support online - "Carter Road was trending, " she points out. She also emphasises that her campaign has no agenda or sponsors: "I just love giving hugs, that's all."

Chip of the New Block

"Flash mobs and free hugs - Bombay's turning into San Fransisco," a recently returned friend from the Bay Area observes. Indeed, there seems to be the emergence of a new kind of community engagement in the city, largely mobilised on the internet and inspired by international projects. It's too early to tell how sustainable it is, but we hope it sticks around. Free  hugs  on Saturday - one of us Scouters is staunchly hug-averse, and it even made her smile.

Getting there: Carter Road, Bandra at 5:30 pm on Saturday, December 10, hugs for free.

Press Council

It must be the traffic of stilettos and tight-laced Oxfords at night spot Trilogy that prompted the launch of Suara in the same hotel, a new spa that drives last night’s pain out of this morning’s feet (and body). Shall we dance…again?. 

This week-old spa sits snugly on level one of Hotel Sea Princess where the elevator opens out into an instantly calming white space with green accents. We were welcomed with a cold towel and a warm smile, but as soon as the rigid punctuality rules were read, the towel turned warm and the smile, cold. So they recommend you reach twenty minutes prior to your appointment to fully enjoy your experience and a no-show without prior notice means a 100% fee forfeit. We’re not sure how they plan on tracking those who don’t show up, but we didn’t ask.

Knock, Knock

bpb knocked on The Cellar Door, a fun new theatre company to find Shaun Williams, actor-founder and in his own words, “Knight of the Uneven Table”. Shaun has worked on several interesting theatre and TV projects, including the fun No Kidding Flipkart TV commercials where he coached little kids who were made to mimic grown-ups (see picture above) and has also worked on The Naked Comedy Festival. Besides training actors, he’s open to working with stone-face folk like you and us. All you have to do is get your friends together, call The Cellar Door and they’ll do a fun acting workshop for a fee.  

bpb gets Shaun to present his version of Mumbai, a six act play.

Best Underground Class in Mumbai: Spinning poi (fire spinning) by Janit Gambhir on his terrace in Bandra (W). Call 9833879338 for details.

Best Theatre Canteens: National Center for Performing Arts (NCPA), Nariman Point for the coffee and cheese sandwiches. Also, Prithvi Theatre Café, Juhu for their simple cutting chai which has improved considerably over the years.

It happened a year ago at a grocery store in London, probably in the juice aisle but she can’t be sure. Six shoppers, with determined looks and to-do lists, broke into song and dance. Just like that. It was only later when she went to her dorm room (at School of Oriental and African Studies) did she find out that what she just witnessed was a flash mob.

Shonan Kothari returned to Mumbai and forgot about the grocery store experience until she saw an old bucket list. “Be part of a flash mob” it said, but there weren’t any in Mumbai. That’s when the 23 year old decided to organise her own, a 200-people strong flash mob that took place at CST last Sunday (November 27), a feat she pulled off in a month (see video here). Red tape and all. Shonan hopes that this will spawn more across the city and shares her ten step program on how to organise a flash mob with bpb:

Plan Your Own Flash Mob

1.       Pick a Venue: CST is a beautiful structure that offers a great indoor space and high footfalls, so that was my dream location for a flash mob. We’d also considered parks like Priyadarshini Park and other open spaces. It might make sense to short list a bunch of venues because some may not grant you permission.

2.      Make a Presentation and Show Up Unannounced: Create a solid presentation on what a flash mob is and how it will benefit the venue in terms of publicity, footfalls, virality etc. I didn’t have contacts or appointments at the cop station, railway station or park, so I just showed up during work hours and made sure they listened to me. I soon saw that everyone was super co-operative – that I had no commercial gain from this made it easier – and I received permissions from almost everyone I approached.  If you’re planning a CST mob, Mr Atul Jani, Senior Divisional Commercial Manager, Central Railways is the man you should be looking for.

3.     Sort out Permissions: You have to acquire three different authorisations - from the venue, as well as the BMC and police. In case of CST, there were a million internal departments that had to grant individual authorisations as well – we even needed a separate permission slip to get a ladder on the premises.

4.      Recruit Your Mob: In order to make my presentation attractive I lied about having 200 dancers on board. Since I lied, I had to make it happen. The best way to do it is send out an email to 20 of your closest friends, and get each one to recruit 20 more.

5.     Swear to Secrecy and Find a Good Practice Spot: It’s not easy to get 200 people to perform routine dance practises in public spaces and keep it a secret, but we tried our best. This involved not using any social media pre-event and splitting up practise into batches. Priyadarshini Park at Napeansea Road provided their grounds for the same.

6.     Rope in Experts for Less: If you are able to sell the idea well enough – it’s still novel in India – you can get cool choreographers and film companies to shoot the event at a subsidised cost or even for free! Ours was choreographed by Bhaumik Shah (he’s worked on a bunch of music videos and Bollywood shows) to the Rang De Basanti song because I figured you can’t go wrong with AR Rahman.

7.      Blend In: The whole point of a flash mob is to look like people at the venue, in our case, commuters.  No loud or revealing clothes, no garish make-up.

8.      (You Could) Sell Your Flash Mob: Although we kept it under wraps, word got out to a few brands who approached us for in-mob branding. I chose not to do it, but you could.

9.     Crowd Control: Where we failed was to control the crowd, who formed a ring around the first five dancers, thereby ruining the initially planned formation, as well as some really cool entries and exits. Make sure you take measures for crowd control.

10. Make it Viral: You should have a multiple camera set up at the venue to get shots from several good angles, do a quick edit and put the video online as soon as possible.

Shonan Kothari is a 23 year-old CSR consultant who previously worked as a researcher at Harvard Business School.