Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Of Grande Dames, Drawing Rooms and Grace

Veena Advani, who’d been at the very top of her trade in New York’s high-fashion world for over three decades, before she’d shut shop and returned to Mumbai last year, had organised the dinner in honour of her octogenarian mother, the statuesque Mohina Gidwani.

It was something of an epochal moment on the city’s social calendar when New York-returned aesthete Veena Advani threw open the doors of her handsome art and book-lined apartment in SoBo to some of the city’s grandest dames this Wednesday evening.

Veena Advani with her guests (Gita Lakhani)

Advani, who’d been at the very top of her trade in New York’s high-fashion world for over three decades, before she’d shut shop and returned to Mumbai last year, had organised the dinner in honour of her octogenarian mother, the statuesque Mohina Gidwani.

Guests included Hema Deora, Jimi Kapur, Pallavi Jaikishan, Sabira Merchant, Sudha Motwane, Geeta Lakhani, Durga Chulani, Kamlesh Lamba, Asha Sharma and Gita Shehnava.

Sabira Merchant and Durga Chulani

The women had been friends for many decades; a few of them recounted stories of meeting when they’d been teenage beauties participating in the Miss Shimla pageants of the forties; others had met through their husbands and children — who were now adults and had children of their own; and still others, in the toniest drawing rooms and art galleries of the city.

One of the canvases by Veena Advani.

And at the centre of it all, shining like rare jewels, were around the dozen or so canvases painted by Advani, a trained textile designer from the Sir JJ School of Art, who’d honed her craft in Germany before moving to NYC and the fashion trade. The canvasses had been created lovingly by her, following the tragic passing of her younger brother last year, in Goa. “It was as if I was pouring all my emotions into my work” she shared. “From feeling as if I were at the bottom of an ocean to slowly surfacing to come up for air, to the realisation that life has to go on and that art was my way forward,” she said, about her striking output, adding, “It took a tragedy to finally fulfil my dream to paint over all else.”

In turning to art as therapy for her grief, Advani might just have created a new art form, predicated on her vast experience of creating bespoke hand embroideries for iconic international labels such as Oscar de la Renta, Geoffrey Beene, Mary McFadden and Donna Karan.

Advani’s paintings incorporate processes of sketching, priming, supervising while her master craftsmen execute the intricate beading and embroidery work, and then finally embellishing on them, mostly with acrylics. “I do not know of anyone else who works in this medium,” she said, adding, “For me, it was the natural way to go.”

As for her dinner, to celebrate her mother and some of her gal pals, who just happened to be some of the city’s most formidable grande dames, the well-travelled aesthete said, “The women in this room could be from anywhere in the world. Sophisticated, worldly, wise and warm.”

Indeed.

Moving On…Gracefully

Kim Sharma, Yuvraj Singh and Hazel Keech.

If there’s an example required of how times have changed and people have evolved, it might as well be this picture, posted yesterday by YRF discovery Kim Sharma, featuring herself along with cricketer Yuvraj Singh and his wife Hazel Keech, at the former’s retirement party recently.

Many years ago, we’d been present when the attractive Sharma and the dashing Singh had been a couple, very much in love, as they frolicked, in the swimming pool at the Taj Village in Goa.

But of course, so much had transpired since those days; Sharma had married and moved abroad, Singh had gone on to even greater heights in his career and then had faced and triumphed over cancer, only to come back stronger, as an inspirational icon and role model. And then had come his marriage and retirement.

‘Good Vibes Only’ Sharma, now the Mumbai-based VP of an entertainment conglomerate, had commented about their picture together last month.

No hard feelings, long-held grudges or needless shade. See what we mean about times changing and people evolving?

WTSWTM:

WTS:

Today (the) coalition government is suffering from challenges and we have tried to face them.

-Karnataka CM HD Kumaraswamy, ahead of the floor test.

WTM:

I would like to raise the issue of keeping enough money in the kitty for horse-trading with my alliance leaders, at the next party meeting – except of course that there is no money, no alliance and no leaders…

Sari Jahaan Se Acha?

Ayushmann Khurrana’s post.

The internet and social media have a strange way of creating trends in this day and age. A couple of years ago it was the Ice Bucket challenge to promote ALS awareness taken up by the likes of Bill Gates and Lady Gaga. The Harlem Shake and Mannequin Challenge and more recently the Bottle Cap trend had followed.

This week, what seems to have caught the attention of tweeple is the ‘Saree Twitter’ trend embraced enthusiastically by the likes of Shabhana Azmi, Barkha Dutt, Sonam Kapoor and even Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. The trend has grown so popular that it even became the subject of Amul’s iconic advertising campaign, created by Rahul Da Cunha this week. But the best saree trend in our book is reserved for critically acclaimed actor Ayushmann Khurrana who shared a photo of himself draped like a young bride-to-be; the post has been liked over 13,000 times and AS they say on social media: It is clearly ‘winning the internet’.