The New York Times once described Malavika Sangghvi as ‘a chronicler for social mores’. Sangghvi began her career in 1978 with The Times of India, which she soon left to become part of the founding team that launched Mid-Day, Mumbai’s first stand-alone tabloid.
Sangghvi has been at the forefront of every journalistic trend, working for the India Today Group’s Bombay Magazine, one of India's first lifestyle glamour feature titles, and then contributing extensively to leading national and international journals, including The New York Times, Harpers & Queen (of which she was India editor in the 1980s) and Business Traveler, amongst others.
Her weekly column for The Times of India’s Sunday Review, ‘Mostly Men’ an acerbic profile of some of the country’s most powerful men, drew much delighted response, as did her column ‘Ordinary People’ for The Indian Express. But what made her a household name was the weekly column ‘Mixed Media’, a spoof on current affairs, that she wrote for almost a decade for Sunday Mid-Day and her soulful ‘Salaam Mumbai’ in Bombay Times.
In 1995, Sangghvi was appointed editor of the Bombay Times, which she took from a bi-weekly supplement to a daily paper, making it an intrinsic part of the Mumbaikar’s reading habit. In this role she was instrumental in not only identifying the Page Three phenomenon, but in also giving the city a compassionate, humane paper that launched many campaigns for the disfranchised.
In 2000, she opted to revamp and relaunch The Times of India’s Sunday supplement, the Sunday Review, one of the largest circulated English weekend broadsheets in the world with a circulation of 2.5 million. Her cover story on Anil Ambani’s marathon running set a new benchmark in personality profiles.
Throughout her career Sangghvi has freelanced extensively for some of the world’s most prestigious journals. She has collaborated on an award-winning story for the Sunday Times (UK) on a hospital for burn victims and another 12-pager for the same publication on the call centre phenomenon. She has also written frequently for The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and Departures.
Besides her prolific and high-profile print career, Sangghvi has anchored her own weekly television show on Murdoch’s Star Network, which ran for a year, and has broadcast extensively on BBC Radio 5.
This Saturday, at Gita Piramal’s brunch to celebrate S Ramadorai’s receiving of the Padma Bhushan, a sliver of smart Mumbai turned up in its designer linen and chic sunglasses at the Blue Sea in Worli for sushi, vodka prawns, beer and sugar cane juice — to congratulate one of its own.
With the goras finally gone, India was celebrating its own birthday, in Pali Hill and Friends Colony and Alipore- the high rollers were beginning to roll in style.
