MUMBAI: It was a farewell to remember for Andre Nair - outgoing chief of Group M in India. The heavyweights of the industry were there to wish him luck on the eve of his departure to Singapore where he will be taking charge of Mediaedge:cia Asia Pacific as its chairman and CEO.
They all turned up....
Peter Mukerjea & Harish Thawani Star India big daddy Peter Mukerjea and wife Indrani, SET India bossman Kunal Dasgupta, MTV head honcho Alex Kuruvilla, NDTV Media's Raj Nayak, Chitralekha's Bharat Kapadia, JWT India's Mike Khanna, O&M's Ranjan and Jimmy Kapur and Piyush Pandey, HLL group media manager (Central Asia) B Venkataramanan, Mediaturf's V Ramani,
Mike Khanna & Nair saying their goodbyes Nimbus' Harish Thawani, Zee TV's new CEO Pradeep Guha, Discovery's Deepak Shourie, IMRB's Hemant Mehta, TAM's LV Krishnan, Lodestar Media AsiaPac head Shashi Sinha, columnist Shobhaa De, HSBC marketing boss Sangeeta Pendurkar and Media Direction head Sandeep Tarkas, as also Sony's Albert Almeida and Rohit Gupta.
And yes Nair's team were there in full strength: CEO Ashutosh Srivastava, Vikram Sakhuja, CVL Srinivas, M Suku, LS Krishnan... the list goes on.
Andre Nair, Ashutosh Srivastava and Vikram Sakhuja with the cops
The highlight of the evening was, of course, Nair's quick silver dancing on the floor. He even got Mike Khanna to do a jig with him, apart from getting close with his wife Aubrey. The pony tailed Mensa member actually donned an MTV Bakra cap for a large part of the evening. The cap came courtesy his being made a 'bakra' by Sakhuja and Srivastava, when he was accosted by two police men who came up to The Rampart Row in Mumbai's plush Colaba area, with one mission - stop the evening and arrest Nair.
"Three Cheers!!!" Nair along with Ashutosh Srivastava
The fun went on for more than 20 minutes and the cops, Sakhuja and Srivastava were seen frantically trying to reach people on their phones, while Nair sweat it out in the middle surrounded by two cops, one with a 'lathi' in his hand.
Nair with wife Aubrey
They called off the action and had a good laugh as Aubrey looked concerned and told the team to call of the gag. Nair took it pretty sportingly and donned the cap.
The party rocked as it went on till the wee hours of the morning. Nair for one, is not going to forget his India innings any time soon.
