Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Vroom Vroom

Word comes in that Mumbai is currently going a bit Lamborghini crazy. The Italian sports car-maker, which had announced the launch of its first SUV in the country,

Word comes in that Mumbai is currently going a bit Lamborghini crazy. The Italian sports car-maker, which had announced the launch of its first SUV in the country, less than a month ago, has now announced that in this short span, it has already sold three such models and what’s more, all three are to Mumbai residents. Though the SUV is priced at a cool ₹3.5 crore, it is still significantly cheaper than the top-of-the-line sports car variant, which retails for over ₹5 crore. “Hat-trick! Lamborghini Mumbai delivers its third URUS”, read a statement from the brand. And, who are some of the lucky owners of the mean machine? “Congratulations to Dinesh Thakkar on your new Lamborghini URUS. From delivering your first Mercedes in 2006 to your latest acquisition, here’s to many more!” posted a representative of the car company on social media. Which, when you think about it, is an exceptional tale of upward mobility if ever there were one. What’s more, according to car buffs, not only does the new owner of the hot wheels boast of having one of the only three such cars in the country, it is not even his first Lamborghini and his fleet of supercars includes a green Hurricane, the top of the line variant. “Thakkar is the CMD of a large broking house, and his company has been expanding steadily since 1997,” informs our source, adding quite unnecessarily, “And, he loves cars.” “Being in the driver’s seat after collecting my new Lamborghini URUS today made me feel as if I was on a NASA launching pad, about to head into the stratosphere,” shared the beaming Thakkar, along with a photo of his new purchase. Come to think of it, the city’s potholes do resemble craters on the moon.

Dinesh Thakkar with his new Lamborghini URUS.

True Lies
It is known as one of the best spa resorts in the world and to be sure, Viva Mayr, the cutting edge institution created around the principle of ‘you are what you eat’ and ‘a healthy gut is the secret to health and well-being’, has become something of a rage amongst India’s well-heeled. First championed in Mumbai by Bollywood personalities like Rani Mukerjee, Simi Garewal and Farah Khan, the Austrian clinic located in the Corinthian Alps has seen a steady stream of A-listers – Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh, Sonam Kapoor Ahuja and Alia Bhatt – check in. But of course, film stars are not the only ones who seek the remedies of this renowned and expensive facility (an average week is said to set one back by approximately ₹3,06,000). Mumbai’s corporate world has been a keen subscriber with many business clans also being regulars. And, with the well-heeled from India making it their favoured haunt for R&R, could the country’s politicians be far behind? In the past, the name of the controversial chief minister of a large state, who had resigned amidst allegations of graft, had been seen on the spa’s rosters. Nothing wrong with this of course, except that her party makes a fetish of being austere and abstemious. Now, it turns out that her fellow party colleague, this time a Minister in the Union Cabinet, is currently undergoing treatment at the facility, along with her sister.

WTS WTM

What They Say
“She mentioned Narendra Modi 10 times during her address and India, only 5 times.”
-Shashi Tharoor on Sushma Swaraj’s recent UN speech

What They Mean
“As for her choice of big, puzzling, many-syllabled and mostly archaic words, the less said, the better!”

God’s Own Country

Dinesh Khanna (left) with late wife Nishi, in Bekal.

How deeply locations are imbued with the memory of loved ones. “Nishi had a great aesthetic sense, which meant her ideas on design were always appreciated by the designers we worked with,” says hotelier Dinesh Khanna, about the property he built in Northern Kerala, Taj Bekal, which miraculously had escaped the fury of floods that had devastated the rest of the state. Nishi, his wife, passed away only a few months ago, while they had embarked on a pilgrimage together and the hotel had always held a special place in her heart. “She was involved from the groundbreaking stage and also in the many concept meetings that were held with the designers and consultants,” says the consummate hotelier, whose family had brought the Holiday Inn to Juhu in the 80s, the first of the big hotels that had challenged the supremacy of Sun N Sand, the top hotel in the area until then. Though his hotel had been amongst the 14 districts, where no alert had to be declared during the natural disaster, for Khanna – whose hotel interest span other properties (he runs the hugely popular Club, a long standing suburban institution) – the people of Kerala including his staff and families, associates, vendors and colleagues had been the subject of his thoughts and efforts. “We had celebrated our 41st wedding anniversary, which also happened to be our last anniversary and also the last holiday we spent together, this January, there,” says Khanna, about the serene and beautiful 27 acres spread between the backwaters and the ocean, where he and his late wife had spent their last holiday together.