Minutes into the video call, our interviewee tells us how the media has hardly ever got his name right. His friends and acquaintances call him Sid. Everyone else knows him as Siddharth Mallya, son of businessman and ex-chairman of United Spirits, Vijay Mallya. “[But,] I’m Sidhartha,” he shares, stressing on the final letter of his name. “That’s how it has always been. I really don’t know when they [media] changed it.”

It is late evening in Los Angeles, when we catch up with the 34-year-old, who is currently pursuing a career in acting there, after moving away from the family business in 2012. We’ve been trying to jog our memory, thinking of his last public appearance in India. He admits it has been years. Once a regular face on Mumbai’s party circuit, Sidhartha now prefers the quiet life: He wakes up before dawn, meditates, heads out for a walk, often with his dog, and then hits the gym, before going for acting class. He hasn’t had a sip of alcohol in three years—the irony that he belongs to a family that has been one of the biggest producers of alcohol in the world, is not on lost on him. The change in lifestyle, however, was spurred by his own mental health journey. Sidhartha suffered through depression in 2016 and was also diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), a condition he realised he had been living with all along.