Sidhartha Mallya has abandoned the entrepreneurial journey his grandfather, Vittal, began decades ago and his father, Vijay, expanded and subsequently lost, to pursue a career in... Hollywood.

"My focus and energy are 100 per cent invested in what I'm currently doing," he says over email from Los Angeles where he is now based.

What is more, in LA, he is not Sidhartha Mallya, but Sid. He says he registered himself as Sid with the Screen Actors Guild so that he could " avoid getting typecast".

Not that much is left of the family business. The spirits business is run by Diageo and the beer business by Heineken. Mangalore Chemicals & Fertilizers is being fought over by Saroj Poddar and Shailesh Mehta.

Kingfisher Airlines has been mothballed: harried banks are breaking their heads over how to recover the Rs 7,000 crore it owes them.

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