An hour into the Vijay Mallya-Raj Shamani podcast, I relived my days as a rookie lifestyle reporter again. Dr Vijay Mallya, or VJM as we called him, was India’s biggest and finest industrialist of his time. The other was Lakshmi Mittal, also incredibly wealthy and flashy, but we barely spotted him in India. These were also pre-social media days so if you had to be known then, you had to be seen in public and had to be read about in mainstream newspapers and lifestyle magazines.
Mallya occupied much space in both. His business successes ensured he was in the pink papers all the time. His father Vittal Mallya’s United Spirits was the largest spirits company in India, and the third largest in the world (after Diageo and Pernod Ricard). He acquired Berger Paints, Best and Crompton Engineering and several other companies to turn his inheritance into a conglomerate. His Kingfisher beer owned more than 50 per cent of the market share. His Kingfisher Airlines owned more than 25 per cent of the market share. He invested in The Asian Age, Cine Blitz, and Hi Blitz, a lifestyle magazine. He bought Tipu Sultan’s sword at an international auction. All of this assured him page-one status in almost every newspaper in the country.
He understood the importance of marketing early on, and decided that he would be the face of his businesses. In the podcast he says, “a brand must have a personality”. Since Mallya could not advertise alcohol in India, he decided to team his own image with surrogate advertising.
Vijay Mallya during a podcast with Raj Shamani | Youtube@Raj Shamani
Mallya was the best and biggest party-thrower in the country. He launched the annual Kingfisher Calendar aping the Pirelli Calendar, with glamorous models in swimsuits and iconic fashion photography. His parties were major events, with Jay Z and Enrique Iglesias flown down (for his infamous 60th birthday in Goa, which newsrooms called his swan song after catching a whiff of the impending doom—in a few weeks he would leave for London for good).
He wore his wealth proudly, believing his successes to be the same as his nation’s successes. How else does an industrialist get to show off, after all? He was the only man in public to wear large diamond earrings then. He wore a lot of jewellery and owned a fleet of high-end cars—several Range Rovers, a Bentley and Ferraris. He also famously purchased Richard Burton’s yacht Kalizma.
He told me much of this over an interview I did for The Indian Express nearly two decades ago. He was warm and respectful every time I met him. I had visited his gorgeous sea-facing bungalow Niladri, at Nepean Sea Road, but his showpiece home was Kingfisher Villa in Goa’s Candolim, then a quiet snobbish beach away from the touristy Baga, now a city centre. Mallya’s Goa house, where he often hosted parties was a 12,300 sqft, three-acre paradise on the beach.
You can already see he provided the playbook for several other business families to follow. He really was the OG industrialist with a huge dash of coolth.
In the podcast, Mallya says he went through a trial by media and that’s certainly a lame cop-out. This is the same media that he courted, and was also a part of.
But was he a victim of his flashiness? Yes. It turned him into a poster-boy of bad loans. He admits to it in a 2016 interview with the Financial Times: “Maybe I should have never have gone down this route at all, in hindsight,” he says. “I am sometimes a victim of my own image. But I can’t do very much about it, can I?”
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