Where is the party tonight?

The party might turn pumpkin at midnight but that’s no reason for Cinderella to despair because there’s always room for an (after) party. Although the police have been keenly gutting the city’s nightlife, Mumbai’s famously unstoppable spirit of enterprise is out to ensure that nothing comes in the way of the good times. Most of the new enterprise has been set into motion by the city’s youth who have felt the need for similar services in their (night) life.
Without so much as missing a beat, Bandra hipsters will list out all the Bandra joints that function—Janta, Mughal Sarai, Sigdi—and in the case of Deepak Wines even deliver, late into the night. Bandra, undoubtedly, has the highest concentration of service providers that enable you to tackle with grace that huge moment when you have empty shelves and refrigerators staring back at you. Thus far, if you didn’t fall within the coverage area of Bandra then, well too bad, you didn’t fall within the coverage.
While these old school solutions have never failed to deliver, recently, peeps living outside of Bandra have taken matters into their own hands. Two new services that promise to assuage midnight hunger pangs and more are knocking on your door.
As the website for Fly by Knight, a delivery service for everything from Eno to Red Bull, states: “Midnight home-delivery service to battle moments when you are consumed by laziness, low on nicotine and craving for a quick snack. Oh…we are also equipped to rescue you with last-minute contraceptives.”
On April 20, Rohit and Kaiser—the partners, both in their 20s, prefer to withhold their last names in order to maintain anonymity—rolled out Nightcall. “Over the past couple of years each time we were in need of some midnight rescue we discussed starting a late night delivery service but things kept held up for one reason or another,” Rohit says. Functional only on the weekends, Nightcall receives seven to 12 delivery calls in one night. “Although the site states that we do delivery only from Cuff Parade to VT, if it’s a reasonably big order then we also deliver up to Parel,” Rohit says.
Come next week and Andheri will have its own service provider in Fly by Knight. Started by Neha Jain and Sanjid Nair, Fly by Knight will have an Andheri to Bandra coverage area and its services can be engaged from Wednesday-Sunday, between 11 pm and 3 am. Soon, however, they hope to spread their network across Mumbai and then to Bangalore and National Capital Territory of Delhi.
Jain, 26, quit her cushy job at Google India to work full time on Fly by Knight. She says, “We have all the permission we need for the business and are currently training our delivery staff and developing their communication skills. We will go live once that is out of the way. This project has been in the pipeline for long but with the city’s current struggle with deadlines we could not have asked for a better launch time.”
Befitting their status of (after) party saviours, both Nightcall and Fly by Knight identify themselves as superheroes, Avengers and Batman, respectively. Superheroes will willingly save your party but when it’s time to head back home from that party, you’re going to have to rely on the services of those super sober mortals also known as drivers.
Perhaps the most well known after-hours service is Party Hard Drivers, a company that offers drivers for hire at night. “We are against drinking and driving and as a result we often found ourselves stranded at parties after a few drinks,” says founder-partner Ankur Vaid. “We strongly felt the need for a service wherein we could call for a driver who would take us around for the night and so Party Hard Drivers (PHD) happened.”
Vaid and his partners—Mishal Raheja and Saurabh Shah—set the precedent four years ago. Since then several similar services, including Dial-a-Drive and Apt Party Drivers, have sprung up. Vaid insists that there is a difference between late night driver services and radio taxis. “Comfort is the big difference,” he says. “You’re in your own car and simple stuff like your own music makes a huge difference to the drive.”
It’s little surprise then that visiting Hollywood dignitary Tom Cruise and his crew called on PHD to drive their convoy of 16 high-end cars across the city.