Alibag Diary

A House On The Beach

What a farmhouse is to the well-heeled of Delhi, a house in Alibag is to Mumbai’s. Twenty years ago, it would have been a simple shack; today, it is more likely to be a Bijoy Jain-designed home. Alibag may be just 20 minutes across the harbour from Mumbai by speedboat but, with its lush greenery, rustic sleepiness and winding village lanes, it feels like a 100 miles away. This is where the Konkan coast begins after all, and if you can have a home here, why go all the way to Goa?

An old friend had invited us to her place in Alibag. I was woken up, late, by the green sunlight slanting onto my face through the many layers of palm-leaves. And as I lay in bed, breathing in the faint blue-grey fragrance of woodsmoke and listening to the loud zinging of the crickets, it came as a delicious shock to realise that there was going to be no newspaper slipped under the door for me. Just some of the little luxuries that have drawn a growing community of interesting (and affluent) people from Mumbai to build weekend homes here. A few years ago, I am told, there were about 50; today, there are at least five times that number. One can imagine a time, not too far away, when this becomes a yuppified kind-of second Goa. I made a major faux pas, while chatting with my friend-and-hostess, who told me over brunch that she was planning to sell her house. “As a matter of curiosity, how much would you expect for it?” I asked. “About 15,” she replied casually. I thought that was a real steal and was about to make her an offer when she, obviously reading my thoughts, added pityingly, “Not lakhs. Crores.”

Footlong Tastes

The perfect complement to an Alibag home is a yacht to get you there and back. Which is why there is a nascent, but growing, yachting culture in Mumbai, as you can tell from the number of spiffy-looking boats in the harbour (about 200, at last count). A friend, who knows about such things, tells me that the three things one should look for in a yacht are performance, aesthetics and length (yes, as in other good things in life, length matters). You could possibly pick up a bottom-of-the-barrel boat for about Rs 10 lakh, but for a decent 30-ft boat you should budget for anything from Rs 75 lakh to a couple of crores. But what my friend now fantasises about is a 60-ft Ferretti with a 1,100 HP engine and a top speed of 37 mph. “It’s the Rolls-Royce of boats,” he explains. So how much would it cost? “Don’t even ask,” he winces.

Meanwhile, the swankiest boats in town are owned by Adi Godrej, Gautam Singhania, Anand Mahindra and Anil Ambani. The pricing at that deep end of the market is calculated, I understand, at approximately a million dollars a foot. And then of course, there’s Vijay Mallya’s 310-ft giga-yacht, Indian Empress, one of the world’s longest private yachts, for which he splashed out Rs 450 crore. But then, he doesn’t just cruise to Alibag and back, he goes to Monaco instead. As Scott Fitzgerald said to Hemingway, “The rich are different from you and me.” And as Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.”

Memories Of A Nightscape

One of the great luxuries in Alibag is being able to look up and see all the stars in the night sky. One of the banes of urbanisation is “light pollution”, which outshines the visibility of the stars. So here, 30 km from the big city, it was a joy to sit under a mango tree after dinner and see the magnificent starscape of my childhood once again. The key to the night sky, I remembered, is usually to locate Orion the Hunter and then follow the clues from his jewelled belt to locate the other constellations and stars, one by one: to Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, which leads you to Canis Major, the Big Dog, to Canis Minor, the Small Dog, and so on. There are about 3,000 stars that should be visible to the naked eye, but one cannot see that many today, even from Alibag. That’s why conservationists are now working on ‘Project Dark Sky’, to save India’s night skies from being faded out by light pollution.

Life’s A Game Of Chance

My weekend in Alibag was a meditation on what it takes to succeed in life. Darwin said it was not the smartest species that survived, it was the most adaptable. My own observation of friends who have done well in life (and today own things like holiday homes in Alibag) is that they are the ones who have been the biggest risk-takers. The ones who—while the others stayed in their comfort zones—took the scariest risks, and then, equally importantly, worked their butts off to make them pay off. No, there’s no such thing as a free yacht.

Why is the sea blue?

The question that inspired Dr C.V. Raman’s Nobel Prize theory of the scattering of light. I wonder how the dirty grey-brown seas of Mumbai might have tweaked the course of science?

Hyderabad-based Anvar Alikhan is an advertising professional; E-mail your diarist: anvaro AT gmail.com