He’s one of the most well-known faces at automotive events across the country. The founder-editor of at least six automotive publications and author of 15 published books at last count, Adil Jal Darukhanawala is the only 'Bossman', as he is popularly called, of the world of motoring scribes, yours truly included. If you met him on any given day in his characteristic T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, you would not imagine that you’re speaking to a man who once wanted to be a railway engine driver and possibly has one of the largest and most interesting collections of scale models of cars, motorcycles, helmets and aircraft. This time for our Collector Series, we speak to this collector whose fascinating journey offers a fresh perspective on what collecting truly means.
“I have a picture of me at seven or eight months old, sitting on the petrol tank of my dad’s Norton,” he tells me with a wry smile at his earliest association with anything automotive. For me, it’s hard to imagine him as a less-than-a-year-old baby. This was the man who gave me my first break into the world of automotive journalism, back in 2003. Sitting in his house in Pune, surrounded by automobile paraphernalia, almost smelling the petrol I know is in his veins, I’m totally zapped by the next bit of childhood memory that tumbles out.
“Our house in Sholapur was about half a kilometre or thereabouts from the railway station. Sholapur was a big railway hub at the time with both a broad gauge as well as a metre gauge line, and there was a very big railway colony next to our house. There were a lot of Parsis and some steam engineers, and they would happily take me on board the steam engines. I wanted to be a steam engine driver,” he says, laughing at my surprise. “It is the only thing inanimate mechanical monster in my life that I can think of that was breathing, hissing, and full of life. I loved it.” Twenty-three years of knowing a man, and here I was discovering new things still.
His foray into automotive journalism wouldn’t happen until decades later, but by his late teens, he was already making good use of the family garage. “There were four Darukhanawala families there, my dad and his three brothers. Between them, there were lots of cars and bikes and I was already riding around on my dad’s bike or my uncles’ or driving around in their cars,” he remembers. He was also a voracious consumer of automotive literature. He tells me that his cousin used to get two foreign magazines, namely Car & Driver and Road & Track, which he would receive after his cousin was done with them, and he would read them cover to cover. He would eventually start his journalism career by chance in 1977 when he had gone to the Katraj Ghats just outside of Pune to watch and take photographs of the London-Sydney Rally, which was passing through. But that’s a subject for another story.
Swinging back to our main subject, Bossman’s stupendous collection of scale models, none of which, he says, is a toy, 1972 was a watershed. “In 1969, we came to Poona (Pune), and we started getting pocket money, all of which used to be saved by mom. During our Parsi New Year or Diwali, our uncles would come to stay with us, and during the summer vacations, we used to go to Bombay (Mumbai) and stay with them. They used to give us money. In ’72, I got enough money to buy a lot of kits to build cars, and that’s where the bug really started,” Darukhanawala tells me before adding that he still had a few of those old cars. Battered and mutilated and time-worn, but still in his possession.
“We could get Matchbox and Corgi toys till the late '70s. And then it all stopped. The government’s own challenges with the foreign exchange and all that meant that these toys became unavailable. But we still had family members travelling abroad and so on, so we could still get them (the scale models). That’s how it all started,” he remembers.
His collection really shot up in the 1990s. A genuine promoter of scale models, Darukhanawala got a friend to start importing scale models, first Bburago and then Maisto (both scale model manufacturers). In the early 2000s, as the founder-editor of Overdrive magazine, subscribers started getting a free gift with a new subscription. A lovely purple Porsche 911 Bburago scale model sits in my drawing room to this day. Back to Darukhanawala, most of his collection of cars have a motor racing connect.
“I always loved motor racing, so while I would grab what I could get as far as scale models were concerned, most of my cars have a motor racing connect,” he explains. “So, I knew what I wanted.” His current collection of scale models is over 8,000 of varying sizes, of which only about 2,500 are displayed at his home. The rest, including Hot Wheels, Matchboxes and Corgis, are locked away in an apartment not too far away. Beyond cars, he is also an aviation enthusiast and has a lovely collection of aircraft models too, but here again, they are either aircraft of the World War II era or somehow connected to Indian aviation.
“By 1999, things were getting out of hand. I had 400 aircrafts, locomotives, cars, bikes and what not. It was all getting a little haywire. So, I gave my entire collection of aircrafts to my younger brother who was moving to New Zealand in exchange for his car collection of 70-80 cars,” he says. His desire to collect aircrafts again started in 2016 when a chance sighting of a scale model of a MiG 21 of the Indian Air Force reignited the passion for collecting aircraft models in this passionate patriot.
Sometime in the 2000s, the collection started becoming more focused as Darukhanawala started going for special pieces and not everything that he came across. And some of them are truly special. “There are loads of them that are really rare,” he tells me. But what makes a scale model, which half the world will not see beyond a toy, rare and coveted? “First of all, the subject matter itself. Let’s take Ferrari as a case in point. Ferrari made around 200 scale models of the 275 GTB, of which only 26 were the full aluminium-alloy-bodied cars. Then again, you could have the regular 275 GTB or the 275 GTB C, which was a proper race car version. These things matter. Then there is the livery,” he explains. Even when he collects multiple models of the same car, there’s a method to the seeming madness. “You’ll see multiple Ford Escort rally cars, but they’re all from different teams with different liveries,” he says.
One of his most special cars came in 2002, from Malaysia, where he had gone for the Malaysian F1 Grand Prix. At a store selling model cars, he found the previous year’s Ferrari of Michael Schumacher in 1:8 scale. “At that time the guy at the store was asking for around US$ 2,000. I had half the money, but I didn’t want to take that leap because it was frightfully expensive. I went back the next day, and it was still there. This model was one of 50 that had been built. I had 60,000 Indian Rupees with me at the time. I kept five thousand for myself and offered him 55, but he wasn’t willing to sell. So, I left. He called me back and asked for 70. I told him I could only give him 55 since I didn’t have anything more. He could either take it or leave it. Finally, he said yes,” Darukhanawala tells me.
The next day, he met Michael Schumacher himself and got the plaque on the car signed by the man himself, making this specific model of those 50 even more precious than ever. Over the years, Darukhanawala has collected more such autographed specials, including scale models of motorcycles and helmets of MotoGP legend Valentino Rossi, and his collection days are far from over. And while a lot of it is his hobby and for his personal satisfaction, he occasionally lets children from his grandson’s class visit and see his incredible collection. What advice would he give to a rookie starting off his own collection? I ask him as a closing statement. “Do your own thing, what makes you happy. Never look to the Adil Jal Darukhanawalas of the world,” says the Bossman, who has created his own amazing toybox to live in. Every single day of his life.