Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Star Power

As reported earlier, Shah Rukh Khan and AbRam landed at Mumbai airport yesterday morning after a brief visit to London. As expected, the superstar’s airport look

As reported earlier, Shah Rukh Khan and AbRam landed at Mumbai airport yesterday morning after a brief visit to London. As expected, the superstar’s airport look – trendy athleisure (white hoody, a black baseball cap with matching beard) ricocheted around the universe almost instantly on landing, thanks to the phalanx of paparazzi assembled. What didn’t get reported though is the star’s in-flight behaviour, which was shared online by a fellow passenger. “SRK and AbRam were in first class,” she said, chuffed at her proximity with the charismatic star, adding, “In fact, AbRam’s caretaker also flew first class.” While the star is said to have slept for most of the journey, while he was awake, he was constantly playing with AbRam and parenting him with attention and gentleness. What’s more, according to the fellow passenger, far from any starry-behaviour or tantrums, SRK is said to have been extremely polite and courteous to everyone. “He posed graciously for selfies with the members of the delighted crew and was polite to the steady stream of passengers from the back of the aircraft who wanted to gawk at him or say hello,” said his new-found fan, about her star-blessed flight. Photographs of the star, after he had landed at Mumbai airport, feature him smiling and being cheerful, in spite of the thronging admirers and flashing light bulbs. After all, that’s how a star is expected to be 24x7, regardless of the circumstance and occasion, and that’s what a megastar like Shah Rukh Khan has trained himself to do. It’s only little AbRam, most-likely bewildered by the crush and commotion he was faced with, who had hid his face behind his cuddly-stuffed snoopy toy. According to reports, this was not the first time the kid had acted media-shy. “He had earlier said ‘no pictures’ to the waiting paparazzi while leaving Aradhaya Bachchan’s birthday party last year,” said reports. Give him time, he will learn.

Shah Rukh Khan and AbRam outside Mumbai airport. (Varinder Chawla)

Here Come The Critics

Richard Vines (HT Photo)

Bloomberg’s chief food critic, the London-based Richard Vines, is currently visiting India. Vines, who spent almost a decade in Asia on previous postings in Hong Kong with the Wall Street Journal and later, the South China Morning Post, has become a towering figure of influence in London’s restaurant sector, having held his current posting with Bloomberg for 23 years. After spending four days in Udaipur, where he visited the vegetable market and took a scenic boat ride on the lake (all documented on his colourful Instagram), he is now busy checking out Mumbai’s bustling restaurant scene. And, we are informed that his first two stops were two of Mumbai’s legendary restaurants – BadeMiya and Shree Thaker Bhojanalay. “Fabulous kebabs at BadeMiya. I really enjoyed the food. If they only served alcohol and had a washroom, my evening would have been complete,” he shared. In other foodie-related news, his colleague Fay Maschler, London’s other all-powerful food critic of the Evening Standard, an old India hand who we have known from the 1980s when we were fellow travellers on food exploration of India, on a chartered jet, as part of an international food extravaganza organised by the Taj’s visionary marketing head Camellia Panjabi, is coincidentally also in India (London’s restaurateurs and chefs must have hung up their boots in relief, thanks to the fact that its two most powerful restaurant critics are MIA). After spending a couple of nights in Mumbai and catching up with Camellia Panjabi for dinner at the The Willingdon Club, Maschler departed for the greener pastures of Goa where she will spend a week of R&R with her sister, the noted chef Beth Coventry. Incidentally, Maschler believes that her bonding with Panjabi and her sister, the London-based restaurateur Namita Panjabi, is largely predicated on the fact that both pairs of foodie sisters share identical birth signs!

True Lies
At a recent glitzy awards show (these days you only receive an award if you attend the show!), this actor, regarded as a thinking woman’s pinup, appeared to be squirming in his designer threads as his former love interest, a beautiful waif of an actress, went on stage to collect an award. She proceeded to deliver her acceptance speech while standing barely a foot away from where he sat with the current love of his life! What added insult to injury and resulted in the all-round awkwardness was the fact that while she made it a point to acknowledge all her colleagues in the hall, in her speech, the names of the actor (and his paramour) who sat directly across from her, were glaringly omitted, say sources. Oh dear! Hell hath no fury.

Nauseous In Mumbai

The Mumbai bookshop. (HT Photo)

We came across this interesting post from Sonia Barby, the Consul General of France in Mumbai. Barby, who took charge of her new assignment in September last year, shared a shocking snapshot of a bookshop at Mumbai’s domestic airport, which featured one of the most controversial book titles of the modern world – Mein Kampf – in its ‘must read’ section, right next to copies of the Bhagavad Gita and The Prophet. “Too much for a Saturday morning: feeling nauseous,” the diplomat posted on social media. Now, of course, we support freedom of expression like most others, but hope that better sense prevails and the odious book that preached divisiveness and resulted in the senseless killing of millions, is removed forthwith, at least from the ‘must read’ shelf! Incidentally, all else appears to be going swimmingly well for Barby in her new posting. Besides spearheading a series of women empowerment initiatives in the city, she held a meeting with the Maharashtra Governor Ch Vidyasagar Rao earlier this week.