Sitting inside her plush showroom at Mumbai’s Turner Road, with enchanting emeralds and rare rubies gleaming silently in graceful pirouettes, I thumb through her immaculate coffee table book—Farah Khan: A Bejewelled Life. It is beautifully knitted together with artful ease and is poetry in motion—like the visual leaf pulled out now and then from her rather enviable treasure trove of sojourns across the country and the globe.
“I have been wanting to put together a book for the longest time,” confesses Farah. It was sheer serendipity, when two-and-a-half years ago, Paola De Luca (leading Italian creative director and luxury trends forecaster) and Farah were chatting about her work in the car on the way to the airport in Goa. Paola suggested Farah cup her realm of memorable experiences, creations, thoughts, musings into a coffee table book. Published by Rizzoli, the book was launched last month, with a foreword by Twinkle Khanna, Princess Diya Kumari and Tanya Dubash.
“It goes beyond a jewellery book. It is a travelogue in progress, a slice of my aesthetic vision, a peep into my journey, my life so far,” enthuses Farah. Art, architecture, nature pour themselves with wild abandon into the luxe 300 pages, revealing the nourishing effect they have exercised on her thoughts while kneading her aesthetics at a sub-conscious level.
“I am a product of my experiences,” says Farah, equally honest in her renditions in print as she talks about the highs and lows that make up her journey: when she chased herds of sun-drunk butterflies, clambered up cherry trees and caught trout as a child in her ancestral home in Kashmir and then later soaked up the splendour of the deserts of Rajasthan, ancient palaces strewn with wondrous carvings, craftsmanship, colour and cherished grandeur (where her father Sanjay Khan shot his lavish historicals), to the trying time a few years ago when she successfully saved her brand from the clutches of an unsavoury investor.
Shilpi Madan for Sunday Standard