Dr Vijay Mallya, liquor baron or ‘The King of Good Times’ (to give him his full name), doesn’t do anything with the glass half-full. Au contraire, he believes in doing things with the entire keg brimming over. Last Sunday found me and the wife attending the launch of the Kingfisher Calendar. The obvious question you’d throw up would be, “What’s a Kingfisher?” and “What’s a Calendar?”
A Kingfisher used to be a bird who migrated in hot weather to become a beer. After lots of consideration it has evolved into an airlines. As for a calendar, well according to eminent historian and Shubu Soren’s stepbrother, Pankaj Bhola, “A calendar is a group of extremly photogenic, scantily clad women mounted (his phrase not mine) on a variety of small numbers who get very little attention.” To make this more clear Pankaj elucidates, “If your looking at Miss December, for example it would be more at the ‘Miss’ and less at the December.”
This year’s launch was on Dr Mallya’s latest acquisition — The Indian Empress — that is about three times the city of Bombay. It’s so big that it makes his earlier yacht look like a goldfish bowl.
In fact, it was large enough to accomadate all of my wife, a fact that I’m wary of at public functions.
As we jostled with Mumbai’s page 3 people, ace photographer Atul Kasbekar, invited his best bevy of beauties, whilst I valiantly distracted Atul’s wife Vandana. Atul broke all rules of personal proxmity while presenting the gorgeous models.
With a fond Dr Mallya and Preity Zinta looking on, he unravelled his body of work. While this was going on, I led the wife to the other end of the boat to see if I could get it to tip over. When my experiment failed I did the manly thing—the only recourse I was left with. I turned to Miss September and as my wife led me off the yacht by my ear, I couldn’t help feeling that I just may have married the wrong photographer.