In spite of being a firm believer in the Groucho Marx epigram, ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept the likes of me as a member’, we cannot help but notice that there’s a whole new shift in Mumbai’s Club scene.

At the top of the heap of membership-only, city establishments of course, have always been the SoBo clubs. The palatial Willingdon, swanning like a grande dame at the mouth of south Mumbai, followed by the hale-and-hearty and unpretentious Bombay Gymkhana, and its south Mumbai neighbours, The United Services Club, the Breach Candy Club, the Cricket Club of India all the way to the Radio Club and the tiny gymkhana clubs that dot Marine Drive.

To these have belonged the denizens of various demographics in the city over the decades: industrialists and aristocrats, willy-nilly, are said to be handed a membership to The Willingdon the minute they are born. The city’s well-heeled professionals and executives gravitate naturally towards the Bombay gymkhana for their rugby and rums and coke sessions, the US Club is said to be the natural habitat for a profusion of defence personnel (though legends like Ratan Tata are also known to take their evening constitutionals on its famous sea front walkaway), and so on and so forth.

In the suburbs, Carter Road’s Otters’ Club and Dinesh Khanna’s The Club in Juhu, more or less have sequestered the well-heeled party-hearties between themselves, with the former also spawning a whole new ecosystem of gym junkies and mum-athletes.

Besides these sports-themed institutions, the Chambers Club at The Taj, a kind of elite boys scout’s institution, which sees captains of industry like Harsh Goenka and Kumar Mangalam Birla on its rosters, and its rival, the Oberoi’s Belvedere Club, where the late Parmeshwar Godrej could be occasionally spotted conducting an interview, have also added their allure. Though other five-star establishments like the St Regis and Four Seasons have their own clubs, they don’t seem to have captured the city’s imagination in the same manner.

However, recently, into this cozy mix has fallen the bane of most clubs: internecine battles and deadly in fighting. Without going into the details of each case, it would not be wrong to say that most of the aforementioned institutions are riven with politics and dissent. Open a local newspaper these days and chances are that your eye will fall on reports or another of these establishments embroiled in some skirmish or the other. If it’s not members fighting against each other, it’s the club itself fighting for its survival against greedy builders, overbearing politicians, wily unions or what have you.

Of course, slowly, almost imperceptibly, because of this, the nature of Mumbai’s clubs has changed over the years as its members have gone from being the city’s old rich to its new poor, even as membership fees have skyrocketed, making them viable only for a new kind of flashy money. One hipster club in SoBo, previously known for its Baywatch kind of theme of bikini babes, is said to have become more a ‘Bhaji with behenji on the lawns’ kind of establishment and any member of any club will tell you over a watery under-priced drink how “things are not what they used to be”.

As if all this were not challenging enough for the existence of the city’s long-standing establishments, there has been a new threat: that of trendy, new private establishments like the recently-opened Soho House in Juhu and the A Club at Lower Parel which offer city millennials a whole new way of looking at membership-only establishments. For one thing, these new private establishments have based themselves in the city’s new and growing neighbourhoods. For another, they have a whole new way of looking at Bollywood, whereas, traditionally, Mumbai clubs were said to be averse to opening their doors to actors (who can forget Feroze Khan’s immortal line, when applying for membership to a city club, that he had a whole list of films to prove he was not an actor?), these brave new clubs have enthusiastically coopted Bollywood, with the likes of Karan Johar and Kiran Rao championing Soho House and Gul Panag engaging with the A Club.

Interestingly, even as it comes to terms with a new club culture and a fight for survival of some of its members-only establishments, Mumbai’s long-lost twin, London, appears to be witnessing an epic arm wrestle between two of its most exclusive elite clubs.

“Annabel’s is hot, but 5 Hertford Street’s Lolous remains out of reach of many Indians including leading billionaires,” said our Mayfair source, about the battle for supremacy currently being fought between Richard Caring’s newly-opened Anabel’s (which he bought from its founder Mark Birley and quickly turned into a celebrity gold fish bowl) and Birley’s son, Robin Birley’s, far more exclusive and harder-to-get-into establishment at 5 Hertford Street, which is said to have a waiting list of 3,000 names long.

With membership fees going up to thousands of pounds, Annabel’s is currently a magnet for rich Indians holidaying in the British Capital. “The Kapoor sisters, Karisma and Kareena, along with Saif Ali Khan, industrialist Ravi Ruia and son Rewant and jewellery designer Queenie Singh with husband Rishi Sethia are all regulars at Annabel’s, rubbing Dolce and Gabbana shoulders with Salma Hayek, Goldie Hawn, Anshuman Mishra, LN Mittal, Chris Gayle and Ben Goldsmith,” says the source. Incidentally, later this evening, Mumbai’s newest entrant to the grouping, Soho House, will see the group’s Founder, Nick Jones, arrive in Mumbai, where he will host cocktails and dinner for invited guests. Nick and his establishment were so convinced of Mumbai’s strong club culture that they entrusted the city with the first Soho house in all of Asia. But of course, international hipness can only go so far. Sources say that plans to open Soho House’s state-of-the-art international spa franchise had to be scrapped as the group’s global name for its in-house spa brand is ‘Cowshed’, and we all know that a name like that could become a touchy subject in aamchi Mumbai!

First Published: Nov 20, 2018 23:04 IST