An Eye For Vintage Treasures

One of the most frustrating things in life is to find yourself caught in a job that you are not really passionate about. But that is not the case with Dr Anurag Kanoria, the founder of Mumbai-based lifestyle store The Great Eastern Home, who has successfully turned his passion for vintage art into a full-time career.

THEY SAY THAT PEOPLE WHO can turn their passions into a career are amongst the luckiest in the world. I guess this is very true and I have come to appreciate this fact as the last 25 years have rolled by. Having built my life around the things that I love—art, design, architecture, literature, academics, and of course, travel—a deep sense of satisfaction surrounds me. And interestingly it all wraps up as part of my being a businessman, that one aspect of Marwari culture that I have not been willing to give up!

Growing-up years

The years of growing up in a Marwari family in Bombay (now Mumbai), with a heavy Kolkata legacy on my shoulders and the expected future of following unquestioningly in the traditional family business brought me to a crossroads, and the early years were ones of unease infused with a pervading sense of bewilderment. What was I to do with all my interests on the one hand and the beckoning expectations on the other? I was lucky to have very educated and broad-minded parents with art, reading and travel as part of my daily existence. Yet ‘tradition’ lay heavy on all our shoulders, because the tremendous richness of what we had at home had its own blinkered expectations. Whilst such expectations were never explicitly stated, they hovered in the air during all those ‘growing up’ years. Growing up in a Marwari home, inadvertently meant—or at least in those years it did—that one would not step out of line, one would happily (or at least quietly) get yoked to the trodden paths.

Closeness with tradition