Malavika’s Mumbaistan: He’d Told Them So

As is known, Star Superior gave race-horse owner and chairman of the Serum Institute of India, Dr Cyrus Poonawalla his fifth Indian Derby and the family-owned Poonawalla

As is known, Star Superior gave race-horse owner and chairman of the Serum Institute of India, Dr Cyrus Poonawalla his fifth Indian Derby and the family-owned Poonawalla Studs, its 10th Derby success at The Kingfisher Ultra Indian Derby this Sunday at the Royal Western India Turf Club. The success of Star Superior is said to hold special delight for him as the billionaire had gone on record before the race, predicting its win against the favourite Sir Cecil, believed to be a super horse and the sure winner of this year’s Derby. No surprises then that its win at nourishing odds of 8 to 1 had many a delighted punter chanting Poonawalla’s name when the results were announced, inform sources. Having read the patriarch’s tip in the local papers on Sunday morning, they had followed his advice and put their money on the winning horse reaping rich returns. And how did Poonawalla, widely believed to be the father of Indian racing, celebrate his victory? According to sources, that evening, eschewing the expected star-spangled party, he chose to spend it with a group of some of his oldest and closest friends, at his mansion in SoBo which features wall-to-wall Renoirs, Van Gogh’s and Chagall’s from his collection of European Masters. The group had included Poonawalla’s old school friend Solomon Sopher, a prominent member of the city’s Baghdadi Jew community; legal eagle Satish Maneshinde; his bloodstock consultant Gautam Kotwal (once the racing correspondent at the now defunct Bombay Magazine); Feroze Vazifdar, owner of Royal China from where dinner was catered for the occasion, and the city’s leading antique dealers, brothers Munchi and Dinsha Shroff. It was here, within this cozy group of his inner circle, over flutes of Dom Pérignon, that Poonawalla is said to have allowed himself bragging rights. When asked how he’d arrived at his accurate prediction, he is reported to have quipped, “I always maintained, I know my horses better than anything else in life.”

Dr Cyrus Poonawalla (in suit) at the Derby.

Every Day Beauty

The Blue Door

Recently, photographer Chirodeep Chaudhuri, whose fine eye for quotidian delights has featured on these pages before, was on his way to see the Fort Bassein at Vasai, along with his wife, the creator of bespoke meals for homes, Rohini Bhowmick. As the couple followed google maps, making their way and missing turns, in their discovery of the area’s large industrial belt, Bhowmick spotted a striking example of ‘aam artist creativity’, a blue door outside an industrial unit featuring a ‘Helper Wanted’ sign, along with a demon mask to keep the evil eye at bay and images of assorted gods from the Hindu pantheon. “It was early morning and so the unit was still shut. There was just so much happening on this lovely blue surface,” said the photographer, who put his camera to good use. “I especially love the strategic placement of the red palm impressions,” he says. Chirodeep is quick to give credit for the documentation of everyday and anonymous art, to his friend Gopal M Sukumara, who he says “is famous on Instagram, where he posts a diverse range of paintings, murals, designs, typography created by the common man, all of which turns the city into an ever-metamorphosing public art gallery.”
“It’s the kind of stuff which would often be sniggered at for its lack of sophistication or called as kitsch by many of us, but always displays a unique vernacular aesthetic,” he says. The ethereal beauty of quotidian objects expressive of the anonymous universal artist so removed from the pretension and rank commerce of gallerists and sundry culture vultures?
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What They Mean
“After all, even if we want to allow the biggest fraudster in Indian banking history to escape the long arm of the law, we would have to make it seem plausible.”

Daddy Cool

Ravi Krishnan with his daughter and her friends.

By any account, erstwhile head of IMG and once high-profile IPL honcho and now wellness entrepreneur, Ravi Krishnan is a doting dad to his talented musician-daughter, currently at school in Indonesia. The sharp-stepping import from Australia, who rolled in to Mumbai on one of the first waves of liberalisation epitomizes, a new age-progressive parent, dividing his time between Bali and Mumbai and missing no opportunity to post pictures of father and daughter bonding, with the hashtag #prouddad frequently. But fatherhood has its fringe benefits too as Krishnan’s tongue-in-cheek recent post, featuring himself as a kind of latter day James Bond along with his daughter and a bevvy of her international friends, each more beautiful than the other, demonstrates. Unsurprisingly, his droll send up of every guy’s fantasy was met with much good humoured teasing from envious pals along the lines of ‘Whoa, lucky man’ and ‘My hero!’. But Krishnan’s message, of course, lay in the legend scrawled across his tee, which proudly stated his feminist world view. And to shore up the message and communicate exactly where he stands, he added hashtags #matriarchy and #womenempowerment for good measure.