If You Eat Meat, You Are Not Allowed Here!

Builders dictate what you’ll eat
-Alka Shukla

Developer of under-construction 60-cr flats at Walkeshwar won’t even entertain purchase request from carnivores.

You’ve heard of housing societies, especially in south Mumbai, denying flats to non-vegetarians. But now taking this food fetish to an unprecedented level, builders of a super-luxury apartment complex at Walkeshwar have announced that no request for purchase will be entertained from carnivores.

The 43-storey under-construction Vandan located close to the sylvan Raj Bhavan comprises 7,900 square feet luxury apartments pegged at Rs 60-crore-a-piece.

The project, developed by Satellite Developers, owned by Kalpana Shah of Tao Art Gallery, was started in 2005.

Confirming that only avowed vegetarians would be allowed to buys flats in Vandan, Sameer Gera, marketing manager of Satellite Developers, said, "Most residents in Walkeshwar and Napean Sea Road areas are Jains, Gujaratis and Marwaris, who (pre-dominantly) are vegetarians.

So our positioning works." The sale is "by invitation only and will be followed by an interview which will focus on family, business, personal preferences and food preferences," revealed a well-placed source from the company. He refused to comment on the kind of response the project has generated so far, but sources said quite a few apartments have already been taken.

Renowned sociologist Farida Lambay said while housing Societies reserved only for people from a particular community can be seen in the light of growing social insecurity with blasts, riots and terror attacks, restricting entry by diet preference is new. "This has been typical of South Mumbai, especially Marine Drive-Walkeshwar belt.

It is just a different way of asserting homogeneity of a community carrying money power. A strange dichotomy where people who’ve had more exposure to the world still prefer living in ghettos."

Before the sky-scrapper came up the land housed a sprawling bungalow, famous as Cosy Corner. It was owned by the meat-eating Cama family, publishers of Mumbai Samachar.

The two-storied bungalow, constructed in the 1920s, had a dozen rooms and a porch overlooking capacious greens. Some scenes of the 1977 blockbuster Amar Akbar Anthony were shot here. Cama Bungalow was sold in 2005 to a group of Jain diamond merchants for Rs 105 crore.