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Anjuly Mathai
Anjuly Mathai

VINTAGE LIQUOR

So long, and thanks for all the rum!

old-monk (File) Old Monk rum

The internet is flooded with tributes for Kapil Mohan, chairman of Mohan Meakin, the maker of Old Monk rum. He passed away on January 6, at the age of 88. But the funny thing is how little information there is about him online. I trolled through page after page until Google became suspicious I was a robot and asked me to enter a captcha. All the tributes contained the same information worded differently.

So now I have the broad sketch of his life—I know he was a brigadier at the time of his retirement from the Indian Armed Forces. He apparently took over the reins of Mohan Meakin (started by his father) in the 1970s, reluctantly, after the death of his elder brother. He never tasted the brew that he produced; he was a teetotaller. He was a very spiritual man who was adamant that Old Monk remain the same over the years. He was strictly against advertising his product.

“We do not advertise,” he supposedly said in an interview in 2012. “I will not, and as long as I am in this chair, we will not. The best way of my advertising is the product: when it comes to you and you taste it, you look at the difference and ask what is it. That is the best advertisement.”

The water used in making Old Monk has been sourced from the same natural spring in Solan for more than 150 years. Apparently, Mohan hated change and was a stickler for doing things the traditional way.

But that’s about all the information I was able to dig up on him. Contrast this with another liquor baron called Vijay Mallya, whose life, famously advertised to have been lived king-size, was splashed all over the internet. From bringing back Tipu Sultan’s sword to launching a calendar with the most glamorous Indian models to owning Formula One teams, he seems to have left no stone unturned to make it to the front pages.

I find myself wondering about the enigma that was Kapil Mohan. He must have been an astute businessman as he led his company to unprecedented heights. Old Monk was the leading liquor brand in the country and managed to hold its own till the mid-2000s. Yet, somewhere along the way, he seems to have lost his mojo. By 2005, Celebration Rum had overtaken Old Monk in sales. In less than 10 years, sales of Old Monk had declined by over 50 per cent.

He seems to have been against innovation. Apparently, after premium brands became favoured among tipplers, McDowell’s raised the price of Celebration Rum, but Old Monk decided to stay put. A news report quotes an employee pointing out that most of the members of the company’s board were past their prime. “I’m sure they were great managers in their time, but you need professionals who are up to speed with market realities to be able to deal with the onslaught of a foreign company,” says the employee.

Mohan’s nephews and heirs of the company, Hemant and Vinay Mohan, say that “there will be more action on Old Monk”. They will be working on ensuring premium limited edition launches of the brand with Old Monk Gold Reserve, Old Monk Supreme. They plan to expand Old Monk into the ready-to-drink category to compete with Bacardi Breezer. Old Monk might be getting the facelift it needed 10 years ago, and perhaps the rum as we knew it will be laid to rest with Mohan.

I remember all the nights my college mates and I spent in Gokul’s, a seedy pub in Mumbai. We’d order a “rum-and-coke” with “touchings” and sit in a cloud of smoke, pretending we knew what we were doing. One of us would inevitably get drunk and the person sitting next to her would have the job of patting her back while she threw up on the leather couch, the sponge of which would be coming out in strategic places. I might not know much about Mohan but I know what he gave me—golden memories in a monk-shaped bottle.

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Topics : #Old Monk