I'd like the finest, please...

Designer Ravi Bajaj tells Anoothi Vishal why he will only serve the best foreign wine at his bar, and why fashion and food (though not aloo parathas) must meet.

D esigner Ravi Bajaj is modest about his musical skills. For some time now, he has been learning how to sing hindustani classical from a guru who teaches some of his friends as well. So which raga has he learnt? I ask. Bilawal? Yaman? The usual two with which students start off. “Just sa, re, ga, ma,” he says with a smile, “My teacher said practice this for a year and then we’ll move on.”

That’s surely an exaggeration: Bajaj can play a harmonium to accompany his songs, and every once in a while he is an enthusiastic organiser of soirees too. “I had friends who could sing and I would listen to them. I’d wish that I could sing too,” he tells me, still discussing music. Some of these friends get together for musical evenings at home where people sing together, a ghazal perhaps, even a film song.

But by necessity, these are small, intimate evenings. “The moment you invite more people, it just doesn’t work,” sighs the designer, “someone’s mobile phone will go off and then, there are just such few people any way who understand music,” he says.

Why am I discussing Indian classical music with a fashion designer in the first place? A good answer to that one could be, of course, that people aren’t really unidimensional, even those we know for a particular line of work. Many years ago, I remember Bajaj, the designer, arriving one evening at the Lady Shri Ram hostel to give us wide-eyed students a talk on fashion, a somewhat pejorative term in the world of academia those days, a field that no one particularly understood and very few admitted to being interested in, at least when it came down to making career choices and not just expressing sartorial preferences. Since then, to use the cliché, Indian fashion has gone places, and got recognised as almost-an-industry (though there are those who would argue with that too). But these are not good days for any industry, certainly not one that deals with the business of luxury, so I ask Bajaj how it is going by way of our conversation opener.

“There are two ways of looking at it,” he says with a preciseness that is going to mark all his conversation. One, he points out, is the school of thought where people refuse to acknowledge that there has been any serious impact on luxury.

But Bajaj falls in the latter category of the more candid, and though he will not give out any percentage as to how much business has suffered, he does go on to chat about the lack of markets in India, apart from Delhi and Mumbai, really conducive to luxury retail.

“We send the cheapest of these sarees,” he says, pointing to some that are hanging at his by-appointments-only set up on the ground floor of his Defence Colony home, to places down south like Chennai and “they are unable to sell them”. Then, there’s a friend, he says, who had opened an ambitious outlet in Chandigarh. A stylish Bollywood star had been called in for the launch and the entire city, it seemed, turned up. But the store had to shut just a couple of months down the line. There were, apparently, no buye.

The aim of this meeting has been to talk about Bajaj’s attempts at setting up a wine bar in New Delhi, in conjunction with his existing café in GK that was set up in consultation with restaurateur Ritu Dalmia. The bar aims at selling wines exclusively; maybe a single malt or two but nothing beyond. It will have a big selection of wines by the glass, most of them imported, “just one Indian because, I know, when expats or foreigners come to India, they look for Indian wine,” says Bajaj, who is more a champion of Italian wine than Indian wine.

It (Indian wine) doesn’t always measure up, he says. The bar is set to come up soon and he may take the business to other areas of Delhi and Mumbai but can’t see any scope beyond that at this moment because of the whole market being so limited as we’ve been discussing earlier.

Bajaj is fond of his Barolos and Barbarescos, he has travelled through Italy, though not so much in the French countryside — “I only go to Paris”. He also confesses to a fondness for a solitary glass of Glenmorangie in the evening. “But it is a drink enjoyed by yourself,” he says. As for food, “Food is not just aloo parathas,” he says a little disdainfully and then seeks to convey the finesse and elegance of the kind of cuisine he likes. Food and wine and fashion, after all, like he says, are components of a particular lifestyle.

From being just a fashion designer, Bajaj is extending his brand to these other areas as well, in a bid to conjure up the entire lifestyle. Everything is linked, he tells me. The fashion industry does not do well in southern India, for instance, because there aren’t really places for an evening out where people can wear hip dresses, is his take. Besides, he gives me another simple argument, “If I call people to my house and serve them any food, they may come in chappals and shorts. But if I serve them fine French food with wine, they will take care and dress up.” In his creations.