Something to think about

I went off to the Nehru Centre yesterday to interview Tina Ambani. It was not a social report, nor a Page 3 kind of gossip piece, but a serious interview about art and the new Harmony show, the art promotional event that she has been hosting every year for 12 years now. When I got to the gallery, just about ten minutes away by car from work, there was a sense of controlled chaos, people bustling busily about with framed canvases and hooks, papers and rolls of sticky tape. And in the middle of the mess, unruffled and cool, was a lady in white, orchestrating the happenings around her with a gentle wave of a diamond-studded hand.

It was Tina Ambani. She posed for a camera, not pleased with its interruption, but knowing that it was part of the hype that she had so efficiently channelled to make her show known and taken seriously. Dressed in white, fabulous gems glittering, she had the air of knowing exactly what she was, who she was and what she was doing. Speaking to her added to that impression – I had seen her before, spoken to her before at a more social gathering, but had never really listened to what she had to say. And that was a whole lot of sense, stuff that showed that under the former-movie-star, socialite wife, one-time playgirl image was a woman of some substance, one who had made a passion into something that was constructive and commendable.

There are so many women like her just in Mumbai today. Some of them may be seen by the general public as flibbertigibbets, butterflies and dilettantes who flit in and out of various projects and causes because they have the right social profile at that moment in time and are the perfect image to create for then and there. But there are others who are genuinely involved in what they are doing, really truly concerned with the cause that they have chosen to promote and the way they go about doing that. Many of these women are wealthy, most attached to rich men – fathers or husbands – but a few have got where they are by themselves, on their own steam, with their own hard work and determination. Those, perhaps, are the women to respect and look up to. The women who are, as one magazine used to mandate, women of substance.