An encounter with Miss World Contestants in South Africa.

Circa 1994 

Sushmita Sen had just won the Miss Femina India – Universe, by the skin of her teeth, snatching victory from another very eligible contestant – Aishwarya Rai. Her streak of luck continued in the Worldwide contest, as she went on to win the Miss Universe Pageant for that year. Most of us were ecstatic by her winning the World’s beauty title after 28 years of Rita Faria winning the title in 1966.

At the same time, many, if not most, of us thought Aishwarya got a raw deal by the judges as she was adjudged 1^st runner-up in Femina’s contest and she was more deserving than Sushmita. Be that as it may, on that day, Sushmita overshadowed all the contestants at the pageant and won the Miss Universe title that had eluded India for almost 3 decades.

While rejoicing in her victory, our immediate attention was on the Miss World title that Aishwarya was contesting, scheduled a couple of months later, in South Africa in October 1994.

A bit of background on our trip to South Africa:

As luck would have it, I was in South Africa then. We were on a tour to South Africa for a conference to celebrate our target achievement. By the way, we had to struggle our way to this coveted overseas conference, as the Finance function was easily the least important function to be invited to such conferences where Sales, Marketing and Technical functions ruled the roost.

We were a huge team of around 120 people from different functions. I still remember a few of the issues we encountered in getting the formalities before embarking on this trip. I was working in the Brewery in Goa and we were told to get the yellow fever shot. Now, not all cities in those days had the facility for getting the yellow fever shot, but Panaji in Goa was fortunately equipped with one. This done, the next step was to get the mandatory warning on all Indian Passports during those years “Not Permitted to Travel to South Africa” endorsed as the Government of India lifted the travel ban a year earlier. So, we rushed to the nearest passport office to get this endorsement done. Again, we were lucky as we could get this done at the Panaji passport office, with the least inconvenience and sent the passport to get our visas. The hindrances behind us, we then congregated in Mumbai, to collect our passport post issue of visa, tickets for our travel and a princely sum of US$ 200 for our out-of-pocket expenses.

Strategically, we split into two groups and flew two different routes (the first one via Dar-es-Salam to Johannesburg and the other that I was in, via Nairobi to Johannesburg). This being my first overseas trip, I walked out very confidently through the immigration and into the transit area at Jomo Kenyatta Airport, Nairobi. The experiences I had heard of international travel, from my cousins, gave me empty confidence whereas I had that strange tremor inside me. On the way from Nairobi to Johannesburg, we had Peter Kirsten (former cricketer of South Africa and Gary Kirsten’s brother) as our fellow passenger. We had no cell phones those days yet we could click pictures with our gigapixel cameras (eyes) and I’m sure others did too. This got stored in our petabyte memory (brain) for any time recall!

On landing at Jan Smut International Airport in Johannesburg, we were amazed at the facilities at that airport. We waited for over an hour at the airport for our shuttle to the destination, which was over 140 km away. We understood that the first batch had already reached the conference destination. Our batch boarded onto two extremely luxurious buses (mind you, most of us had not seen such machines earlier) and eased onto our seats. The inner cabin was so quiet that even if someone gasped or breathed heavily, we could hear it. As we started to our conference destination, we were amazed to see that the drivers of our two buses were communicating over wireless radio headsets (another first for us from India of those days).

As we drove at a high speed of over 100 km/hr on the freeway, we were amazed to see that the first set of traffic lights was almost 120 km from the airport where we started. UB Group had just then invested in a few ventures in South Africa and Mabula Game Lodge, including a 14,000-hectare game reserve, was a significant one at that. This was the destination of our conference where we spent four nights and three days. Mr. Vijay Mallya, our chairman, presided over the conference, which had many a first for us in terms of work, entertainment, food, drinks, fun and frolic. One amongst them was the safari drives inside this massive game reserve. Another one was a night dinner in the wild – a spit-braai where a game (Impala or other antelope) was hunted and cooked over naked flames, after skinning and cleaning it. We watched so much of the game meat (Venison) being served during the night out in the wild, while in the camps we had a plethora of food consumed by normal people. We, vegetarians, in small numbers, were well taken care of by my colleague Ramprakash, who was deputed to this place from Bangalore Brewery and was a vegetarian too. He served this entity for 4-5 years and returned to Bangalore to assist Mr Mallya’s Secretariat. He was my boss during his second innings in South Africa when I too went on a two-year contract, stretched to 16 years and lasted till 2017. That is a story for another day!

Post our conference, we were huddled in shuttles (luxurious, to mention the least) for the next place in our itinerary – Sun City. We stayed in a hotel called ‘The Cascades’ opposite to the casino. This hotel was obscenely opulent with luxury cascading in every nook and corner of this place (an aptly named hotel indeed). Another first we encountered in the whole of Sun City was the experience of jolts of electric shocks on touching any metal surface. The railings, door handles, you name it in metal and it gave us a shock. Later, we found out that it was due to static electric charges on the highly polished metal surfaces.

We then were taken to a cabaret show in a huge auditorium that was very well performed by over 20 women artists. We indulged ourselves in the casino and a few other water-based theme parks. One, worth mentioning is the ‘Valley of Waves’ that created artificial waves at regular intervals. Then there was a 50-meter slide that brought us down into the water and so on.

After two nights there, we started packing our stuff and checking out of the hotel. It was then that we caught a glimpse of the beauty queens from various countries around the World, congregating at our hotel, checking in for their stay. Sun City was the host to the Miss World Beauty Pageant that year and as the contestants walked in, we were on our way out, with a heavy heart – of missing out on being with them in the hotel, for one and sad to see that we were forced to move out of this lovely place, for another.  

As we made way for them to stay in our rooms, we moved on to our next destination, Johannesburg about 180 km from there. We were housed in a couple of hotels across Sandton, a posh business suburb and the location of the renowned Sandton City towers, a huge mall and business complex. We were warned not to venture alone or in twos due to the high crime rate in the city, hence, we always used to go out in groups. On one such outing, we were flabbergasted to see our humble Ambassador car in the Sandton area and I still have a photo of it in my archives. Probably it was the original English Morris Oxford or so or maybe someone was brave enough to import one.

The next day, we visited an old and abandoned Gold Mine called ‘Gold Reef City’. There was a show of melting Gold and pouring it into a block and some comedy around lifting the block with two fingers and if one could do it on the 30^th of February, they could keep the block. This too was a theme park with rides like roller coasters, etc.

We also went about 100 feet down the old shaft, guided through the tunnels and shown the veins in the rocks that contained gold.

Then, there was a short chopper ride that hovered for a minute or so, for those who were generous with their pockets.

Our next stop was the Oriental Market, a mall where the shops were owned and manned by persons of Indian origin. A few of us bought mementos here. A trip to Pretoria (the capital city of South Africa – hitherto most of us had thought that the capital city was Johannesburg) and drive past the parliament building (designed by the architect one Mr. Herbert Baker, who designed our Parliament House in New Delhi too) and return to Sandton Sun hotel.

The next day, we again flew in two batches back to Mumbai, en route to our home destinations.

The Miss World title:

Now comes the interesting part. I am unsure if we had a live telecast coverage of the contest, but I remember seeing the clippings of this and was mildly amused, not surprised at all, to see Aishwarya Rai winning the Miss World Pageant comfortably. Few of us had already guessed that she would win hands-down, as our point of contention was, ‘If Sushmita can, Aishwarya must’!