Supreme irony: Sliver of cake fetches Rs 20 lac but Kingfisher house fetches a third of its reserve price

Debt Recovery Tribunal Bangalore, at its wit’s end, sells Kingfisher House for a pittance—Rs 52 crore as against the original reserve price of Rs 150 crore—at the sixth attempt. Across oceans in distant London, around the same time, a sliver of Diana-Charles wedding cake of 1981 antiquity fetches Rs 20 lakh. The sliver was given to Moya Smith, a member of the Queen Mother’s staff, who preserved it with cling film and dated it July 29, 1981, when the royal marriage took place. Her family sold it to a collector in 2008 who in turn successfully auctioned it on August 11, 2021, for a price that pleasantly exceeding many times over his modest expectation of 500 pounds.

In March 2021, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's first-ever tweet was sold for the equivalent of $2.9 million (£2.1 million) to a Malaysia-based businessman. The tweet, which said "just setting up my twttr," was first published on March 21, 2006, and was auctioned off by Mr. Dorsey for charity. Welcome to the strange world of auctions. More baffling is the rationale, if there is one, of the buyers for their extravagance. Banality and cloying sentimentality seem to be their calling card. Be that as it may.

Ville Parle where the Kingfisher house is located is too close to the airport which inevitably throws up height restrictions on adjacent properties and thus is not favored by realtors despite its sprawling size, 2401 square meters, say those in the realty business. That it took six attempts and casting aside of the supposedly carefully calculated reserve price speaks volumes of the entirely different set of factors at work in the more serious world of the auction of solid, serious business assets. Kingfisher house housed the headquarters of the grounded Kingfisher airlines.