"He was intended as an overdressed flunkey, not courteous royalty,” reveals Meher Marfatia in her fortnightly column "Once upon a city” in The Mid-day of March 5, 2017. The tubby mascot of Air India (earlier Tata Airlines) India’s national carrier, was created
by then commercial director of the airline Bobby Kooka in 1946. The jovial Maharajah according to the website of India’s national carrier, "began merely as a rich Indian potentate, symbolizing graciousness and high living... His creators gave him a distinctive personality: his outsized moustache, the striped turban and his aquiline nose.”
Kooka tried, along with artist Umesh Rao of J. Walter Thompson’s (JWT), "a thousand designs of the bowing Maharajah with perpetually closed eyes, experimenting with different girth measurements for him,” Kooka’s nephew Saleem Ahmadullah and niece Gita Mistry (their mothers were his sisters) informed the columnist. Indira Parikh, Kooka’s secretary in the late 1960s recalled that Kooka was "bent on” informing her of weekly plans on the telephone the moment she would step into their office. The call would be followed by speedy execution of Kooka’s creative idea by JWT’s artist, and its hand-painted execution on a hoarding at Kemps Corner, a site that the airline has retained till today.
When then chairman J. R. D. Tata announced the airline’s plan to move into its new headquarters in South Bombay, the turbaned mascot quipped "Nariman had a point and I’ll be on it,” a reference to corporator K. F. Nariman who masterminded the reclamation that formed the new business district of Nariman Point. Almost chameleon-like, he (the mascot) "can be a lover boy in Paris, a sumo wrestler in Tokyo, a pavement artist, a Red Indian, a monk... he can effortlessly flirt with the beauties of the world. And most importantly, he can get away with it all,” states Air India’s website.
"The mischievous character (of the mascot) was Bobby’s personality,” Ahmadullah says of his uncle, who served the airline for 35 years. He shares with Parsiana on March 15, 2017 that Kooka’s given name was Sohrab, but having been called ‘Baba’ at home, the first time anyone asked him his name in school, as a five-year-old, he answered ‘Bobby.’