Uncovering Urban Legacies: Stories of Bombay's Precincts - Mazagon

Captain Ramesh Babu is an engineer, author, and storyteller. He is an alumnus of the National Defence Academy at Pune, with multiple academic qualifications, including a Post Graduate Degree from IIT, Bombay and a M Phil degree from Mumbai University. Retired from a professional career spanning four decades, the Captain served the Indian Navy for 25 years, followed by a stint at the Mazagon Dock at Mumbai for almost fifteen years. His naval appointments ranged from sailing the missile Destroyer INS Mumbai, to setting up the naval base at Karwar, with the very first ship lift in India. While in service, he visited England, France, Spain, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Seychelles. At the Mazagon Docks, he worked on submarine design, corporate planning, and finally retired as an Executive Director, heading the CSR and Make in India verticals. While serving here, he used to conduct walks in the Bombay Fort area, and also support slum children in the city. He led the Mazagon Docks team in extensive relief work during the Covid 19 pandemic in the area. He was placed at Calicut by the Government to set up a shipbuilding research centre from 2015 to 2018. As a hobby there, he designed and conducted the Calicut Heritage Trails. His book, bearing the same title, was published at the 2020 edition of the Kerala Literature Festival. He has earlier published “After You Sir”, an anthology of school stories, and authored books on the history of Mazagon Docks and the 200 years old Bombay built sail ship HMS Trincomalee. “After You Sir” has been recently translated into Russian. His latest book, “My Own Mazagon”, resurrects the lost history of an island in the Bombay archipelago. Published by Indus Source in July 2021, this book is the Captain’s parting gift to the city that was his home base and Karma Bhumi for almost three decades. He bid farewell to Mumbai on superannuation in July 2021. Now settled in his native village in Central Kerala, Captain Ramesh Babu is into charity, social work, writing books and guiding children.

Zeenat Kulavoor is a multidisciplinary artist based in Mumbai, India. She wears many hats, a Typographer, Graphic Designer, Book designer and a print maker, she loves working with everything that’s tactile.She runs a boutique design studio called Bombay Duck Designs. At BombayDuckDesigns, she has worked on a variety of projects in the areas of branding, art direction, festival decor, packaging, murals and installations, publication design, websites and stage designs for clients ranging from MNCs to cultural institutions to Indie musicians. She has been the driving force of design and development of all self-published books and illustrated zines from BombayDuckDesigns over the past 14 years.Her personal body of work specialises in working with Multilingual Indian scripts. Urdu type, lettering & calligraphy fascinates her the most. Using tongue-in-cheek humour and wit, combined with the use of scale and varied printmaking methods, Zeenat is working towards reinventing possibilities of how the script can be a part of regular day to day life.Find some of her works here www.bombayduckdesigns.com & www.zeenatkulavoor.com

Rahul Reddy is the founder of Subko Specialty Coffee Roasters. With Subko, Rahul intends to help reimagine the Indian Subcontinent as a legitimate contributor to the global specialty coffee movements. The conception of Subkobegan in December 2018, and cemented itself in February, 2019, when Rahul decided to leave behind careers in the technology, social enterprise, and risk analyst worlds to train as an apprentice at a specialty coffee company called City of Saints in Brooklyn, New York. There, he learned the art of profile roasting coffee as a roasting apprentice, learned specialty brewing, packaging, producing cold brew, and farm level green bean buying. He also completed what is considered the coffee world’s most rigorous ‘sommelier’ certification, requiring him to pass 21 sensory analysis exams around coffee, called the Specialty Arabica Q Grader.

Nikhil Mahashur's strong passion for hospitality and commercial architecture is blended with a broad experience in PMC. He believes in creating a space not only for the person who commissions it but for the people who are going to use the space – each project is a celebration of that space and its intimacy. He describes his architectural style as Eclitecture - designing cotemporary buildings and layering them with traditional elements. He firmly believes that the first impression is the one that will make you fall in love with the building. Helmed by Nikhil Mahashur, Nikhil Mahashur & Associates (NMA) is accustomed to delivering exemplary projects across Architecture, Renovation, Interiors and PMC. NMA's design philosophy is therefore entrenched in creating the right first impression and a WOW factor through simplicity, where even a little chaos can be simple.