COVER GIRL: Kate Moss

India in vogue, Vogue in India

It must be over five years since Nicholas Coleridge, England’s most charming man, invited me to have a drink with him at Claridge’s when I urged him to include more Indian stories in Vogue and indeed take Vogue to India.

I was, in a sense, preaching to the converted but he didn’t think the time was right. Over the years, he has been a frequent traveller to India and finally, on September 23, Nicholas, who is overseeing the Indian operation as managing director, British Condé Nast, and vice-president of Condé Nast International, is launching Vogue India.

For the new India of 9 per cent GDP, this is an important moment, signalling the country is in vogue in every sense of the term. Nicholas is delighted that “Condé Nast is the first Western publisher to have been allowed by the Indian government to set up a wholly-owned subsidiary”.

He confirms: “Our main office is in Mumbai, with a second office in Delhi, and we are hoping to raise the creative bar in Indian fashion journalism. There are plenty of talented Indian journalists to work with. We have put together a strong team of about 70 staff, and will be launching further titles in the near future.”

He adds that the first issue “coincides with a surge in interest in luxury goods and western fashion in India, with Gucci opening a store, and Louis Vuitton, Dior, Chanel and others expanding their efforts. Editorially, we aim to mix western and Indian fashion, and have been working closely with all the top Indian designers. It is important the magazine is seen as relevant. We expect to sell the majority of our copies in the top 20 metropolitan cities”.

He reveals that the photographers Patrick Demarchelier (who snapped Princess Diana and was present at her thanksgiving service last week) and Paolo Roversi “have both contributed to the launch issue, which will be almost 400 pages long”.

His very competent managing director, Alex Kuruvilla, is a friend of mine but I don’t know the editor, Priyya Tanna, who might yet be tempted to model herself on the assertive editor in The Devil Wears Prada (just joking).

Despite being a druggie, Kate Moss has made the cover of British Vogue on no fewer than 24 occasions, which makes me wonder who will evolve as the face of Indian Vogue — will it be Ash or Shilpa or any of the Bollywood actress-models?

Sadly, I have not been invited by Nicholas to Vogue’s “launch dinner for 400 people held in Jodhpur, with guests being flown in from all over the country”.

NAMASTEY INDIA: Amrita Arora at the India festival...and Celina Jaitley too

Faces of India

Whether Amrita Arora and Celina Jaitley will ultimately feature in Vogue remains to be seen, but I certainly hope they do. The two 26-year-olds were the pretty faces of the “new India” when the “India Now” season, backed by Mayor Ken Livingstone, ended with an Indian-themed festival in Regent Street.

Amrita was in one basement room in the Court House Kempinski, the latest London hotel to be adopted by Bollywood. Celina was in another.

One by one hacks were ushered into their presence and told we had three minutes with each girl. Amrita, who is Malaika’s kid sister, told me Bollywood was full of sister double acts — “Shilpa and Shamita, Kareena and Karisma, Raima and Riya” — but unlike Shilpa’s mother, hers did not escort her everywhere.

“I let my mother out of my sight at times,” joked the chirpy Amrita.

Celina, who was apparently born in Kabul to an Afghan mother and an Indian father — I hope she is cast if there is a remake of Kabuliwala — said girls in India were more modern than Indian girls in Britain.

“They have a lot to learn from us,” observed the well behaved Celina, who hails from an army family. “Indian girls in Britain are more conservative.”

Outside in Regent Street, I stopped a group of folk dancers.

“We are the Lok Chhanda Cultural Unit from West Bengal,” said one, looking slightly bemused with the representation of “Indian culture” — mostly DJs hired by BBC’s radio Asian Network to deafen us with “music”.

CHEF’S SPECIAL: Monisha Bharadwaj

What’s cooking?

So what’s cooking on the Indian food front? It’s home cooking — “simple, nourishing, healthy, quick and tasty” — as taught by Monisha Bharadwaj, daughter of Vimla Patil, who created many a Miss India when she ruled the roost as long-time editor of Femina.

Monisha, the Indian community’s answer to British “domestic goddess” Nigella Lawson — except that Nigella does not teach classical Indian dancing — gives lessons on Indian cooking to students in groups of 15 to 20. She can also give individual lessons.

Indian food is evolving in Britain. After cheap restaurants, cheap takeaways, cookery programmes on television, expensive restaurants, chilled Indian meals sold in supermarkets and very expensive restaurants, the logical step is for the Brits to learn to cook their own curries.

As Monisha points out, all the ingredients are easily available in Britain where the most unlikely people, I find these days, turn out to be vegetarians — you can make good friends by sharing your dal with English neighbours.

“Cooking with Monisha has reopened for the autumn and is now taking bookings,” says Monisha, who has returned with a sigh of relief from a “holiday” in Mumbai. “I am a Bombay girl but the city has changed — you can no longer live there.”

One feature about Britain is that it is the men who appear to relish cooking.

If an opinion poll were to be carried out among Indian women in the UK, I would not be surprised if, say, 82 per cent said: “No, I don’t cook. Why should I?”

Underground press

Asim Dasgupta, the West Bengal finance minister, appeared to enjoy chairing a press conference at India House in London last week in his capacity as chairman of a group of 13 finance ministers from various Indian states.

The ministers had toured Brazil before coming to the UK to study Valued Added Tax but perhaps the most important subject I discussed with Asim Babu was the state of Calcutta’s underground drainage.

If we are to have Bengal Shining, we surely cannot have Calcutta turned into Venice without the gondolas with every heavy downpour.

No, we can’t, he agreed. “In fact, we are floating a tender,” he said.

Yorkshire, I reminded the minister, had suffered from the same problems of flooding, so the task of improving Calcutta’s drainage system could be done by Yorkshire Forward, the development agency which hosted IIFA this summer.

“They should bid for it,” said the minister.

Over to you, the land of Geoffrey Boycott.

Tittle tattle

Instead of having sued Jazz Barton, her former de facto agent in the UK, Shilpa Shetty should express her undying gratitude to the woman she has wronged. When a newspaper approached Jazz recently looking for “dirt” on Shilpa — sections of the British press are now gunning for the winner of Celebrity Big Brother — its journalists were told that Shilpa was personally a lovely person and there was no dirt on her. If I were Shilpa, who has clearly been misled, I would tender an abject apology to Jazz whose negotiations doubled her Channel 4 appearance fee.