How
have Vijay Mallya's troubles with Kingfisher Airlines affected his lifestyle and myriad
non-business interests? Indulekha Aravind, Malini Bhupta and Probal
Basak ask his
friends and business associates
Vijay Mallya has a close friend in Delhi.
Let’s call him G. He holds Mallya in high esteem and the two businessmen talk
to each other frequently. But in the last 10 days, ever since news broke out
that Diageo would acquire Mallya’s United Spirits,
G has held back from calling his old friend. “I don’t know if I should
congratulate him,” says G. “After Kingfisher Airlines [was grounded], he seems
to have lost the Midas touch.” The loss of business and the bad press Mallya
has got on Kingfisher Airline, G fears, will crimp his friend’s flamboyant
lifestyle. Mallya, it hurts G to admit, will have to lie low for a while.
Even if he
doesn’t, it will be a long wait before the media warms up to him once again.
The famous tag of “king of good times”, used equally for Mallya and his
Kingfisher beer, has been punned mercilessly in newspaper headlines to
highlight the trouble in his airline. Mallya’s recent comments, and tweets,
reveal his angst. On January 10, almost nine months before Kingfisher Airlines’
licence was suspended, he had tweeted: “Looks like certain media houses are on
a paid and highly motivated mission to discredit Kingfisher (Airlines) and
encourage shift of traffic (to other carriers).” On October 28, when he came
for the Formula One Grand Prix at Greater Noida in his private Airbus (there
was speculation that he wouldn’t do so, as the jet may be impounded by his
cash-strapped airline’s creditors), he let out another broadside: “You believe
Indian papers have any credibility?”
G insists Mallya is upset, not bitter. Then
how does he explain the digs at rivals? On August 26, he retweeted twice
journalist Barkha Dutt’s outbursts at delays on IndiGo flights. On March 14,
Mallya had taken a potshot at Captain G R Gopinath, from whom he had bought Air
Deccan, a primary cause of his airline’s woes: “Ask [the] media — why no expert
reaction fr[o]m Capt Gopinath on [the] railway budget. He has great surface transport
experience [for] both passengers and cargo.” Mallya's office did not respond to
a request for an interview for this article.
In a way, the
low profile that G fears his friend will now have to keep has already begun to
take effect. In late October, Forbes removed the billionaire tag
from Mallya’s name as his net worth had fallen from $1.1 billion to $800
million, thanks to his troubled airline. Mallya reacted on Twitter on October
25: “Thanks to the Almighty that Forbes has removed me from the so-called
billionaires’ list.” It would cause, he hoped, less “jealousy, frenzy and
wrongful attacks”. For over six months now, his tweets have abstained from
highlighting the good life he is so fond of. On February 6, Mallya had tweeted
about his stay at the luxurious Taj Falaknuma Palace hotel in Hyderabad. On May
4, his Twitter followers learnt that he was dining at Atmosphere on the 123rd
floor of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. “Magnificent view,” he had tweeted. “[I
have] never been so high up in my life.” There were no such tweets after that.
“There was a need to scale down his lifestyle engagements after the [Kingfisher
Airlines] crisis,” says adman Suhel Seth. “He was seen as clinical about the
young men and women he employed.”
But there is no stopping his son Siddhartha,
25. In April, he had hired celebrity-management firm KWAN to find him brands to endorse.
Mid-September, as Kingfisher Airlines was gasping for breath and its employees
demanding their dues, saw him walking the ramp for designers Shantanu and
Nikhil Mehra, arriving in Goa for the shoot of “The hunt for the Kingfisher
calendar girl 2013”, playing volleyball on the beach with 12 bikini-clad women
and requesting all to vote for him for the “GQ most stylish man of the year
crown” — it went to John Abraham. Earlier this month, he was busy asking all
fellow US citizens to vote in the presidential elections. Seth says he has told
Mallya “to tell Siddhartha to stop tweeting and hosting calendar
launch events”.
Beyond the headlines and hubris, Kingfisher
Airline’s spiral seems to have accentuated Mallya’s spiritual side. He was
always known to have a strong religious streak — admitted to considering
Tuesdays and Saturdays inauspicious, had his new aircraft circle the Tirupati
Balaji temple and made the annual pilgrimage to the shrine at Sabarimala. But
ever since the crisis began, Mallya has increased the frequency of his visits,
earlier confined to festivals and special occasions, to the shrine at Tirupati
in Andhra Pradesh and the Kollur Mookambika and Kukke Subrahmanya temples in
Karnataka, says a source. Earlier this year, he made an offering of a
gold-plated door that cost around Rs 80 lakh to the Kukke Subramanya temple and
has promised to donate another. He also had a tantric pooja conducted at his residence in
Mumbai a few months ago by a team of priests specially flown in from Kerala.
This had been preceded by a yajna to ward off evil at his
residence in Bangalore, says the source.
* * *
Mallya was the toast of Bangalore till the
1990s. There was none bigger than him in the world of business. Then the
information technology revolution began to happen in the city. Mallya was
eclipsed by IT czars like Azim Premji and N R Narayana Murthy. Mallya was never
one to give up without a fight. “Only a handful of people have heard of
Infosys. But ask any man on the streets and he will have heard of United
Breweries,” he had told Business Standard in the summer of 2003. Things
have changed since then. “In the last 10 years, Vijay Mallya had deracinated himself from his
Bangalore identity. So the turmoil barely caused a ripple here,” says Prakash
Belawadi, Bangalore-based theatre personality and keen observer of life in the
city. “This was also because he was shabbily treated by successive state
governments. He had kind of given up on the city.”
In Bangalore, Mallya had come to be seen
less and less on the party circuit over the years. “He was one of the first to
host pre-launch parties, which were legendary, and he was definitely one of the
biggest celebrities in the 1990s. But the action has shifted to Mumbai and Goa,
and these days he seems to be mostly abroad,” says fashion designer Prasad
Bidappa, a close friend. In keeping with his interest in fashion, Mallya had
also launched the Kingfisher Fashion Awards in 2000, significant at that time
because there were not many awards for the fashion fraternity, says Bidappa. But
all of that took a backseat after the launch of the airline. Another
Bangalore-based fashion designer and close friend, Manoviraj Khosla, who still
designs Kingfisher merchandise and does work for the Kingfisher calendar, says,
“I’m sure the crisis has taken a toll on him but it is difficult to say to what
extent.”
Mallya’s parties, a Mumbai socialite
insists, have now moved abroad, to his vineyards in South Africa and his yacht
(theIndian Empress)
in Monte Carlo. His yacht party in May was attended by, amongst others, Antonio
Banderas and Bernie Ecclestone. “Despite the crisis,” Seth insists, “Mallya
hasn’t changed one bit. He enjoys his life and is unapologetic about it.” His
friends in Mumbai swear by him. “Mallya is terrific with his friends in terms of
time, commitment and affection,” says socialite and entrepreneur Queenie Singh.
“He remembers your birthday and comes to meet if he is in town. He knows your
children, what they do and he asks about them when you meet him.” When Singh
was opening her jewellery outlet at The Dorchester in London, she asked Mallya
to be there. “He took an earlier flight and came straight from the airport,”
she says. “He never minimises his friends.” Shobhaa De, the author, calls
Mallya the most intelligent individual she has ever met (Shahrukh Khan comes a
close second). “He can never become an untouchable,” she says. “He is way too
charismatic, even with his back to the wall.”
* * *
Despite all the turmoil at his airline,
Mallya seems to be trying to insulate some of his other interests as much as he
can. At the Vittal Mallya Scientific Research Foundation in Bangalore, set up
in 1987 and named in memory of his father, it is business as usual, says a
senior research scientist, requesting not to be named. “Mallya has taken
personal interest to ensure that our funding is not affected. Even during the
height of the crisis, he ensured he made time to talk to our director,” he
says. “Because of his efforts, morale at the institute has remained high and
there has been no attrition.”
But G, Mallya’s friend, says that many
activities funded until now by United Spirits may get affected as Diageo will focus
on ramping up profits. This is perhaps what makes Kolkata’s football lovers
jittery. McDowell’s Mohun Bagan is sponsored by United Spirits, while arch
rival Kingfisher East Bengal is supported by United Breweries. Anjan Mitra, the
secretary general of Mohun Bagan, feels the sponsorship gives tremendous
coverage to United Spirits’ McDowell’s whiskey, so there is no reason for
Diageo to snap the ties. Diageo, it is expected, will not tamper with United
Spirits’ IPL team, the Royal Challengers.
There is no evidence so far that the
trouble with Kingfisher Airline, and the sale of United Spirits, has dampened
Mallya’s enthusiasm for motorsport. He is the chairman of the Federation of
Motor Sports Clubs of India, which oversees motorsport in India. “Vijay has
always participated very actively in the principal decisions of FMSCI and
continues to do so, and his airline business has in no way affected this. In
fact, he has just confirmed his presence at our next annual general body
meeting next month,” says FMSCI President Vicky Chandhok. Sahara Force India,
the Formula One team he owns 42.5 per cent, too is unlikely to be affected.
Another passion has been horse racing, with
Mallya owning a stud farm at Kunigal in Karnataka. There has been some
belt-tightening here but not at the behest of Mallya — the farm, says a source,
has not imported any thoroughbred, the cost of which can run into crores, for
the past couple of years, though it’s otherwise business as usual. The two
principal derbies in the Indian racing calendar, held in Mumbai and Bangalore,
are both sponsored by Mallya, with the prize money at this year’s Mumbai derby
going up to over Rs 2 crore. At the Karnataka State Cricket Association,
though, he's a largely absent member.
It will now be decided if Mallya is really
the king of good times.
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/mallya-20/492771/
