“I have dreams of living on Kalizma and never living on land again”
“When I sit on the sandbanks and watch the Kalizma, I could spend hours just staring at her,” explains Omani businessman Shirish Saraf of his newly acquired yacht, while reclining on his sofa in London. “It’s like she grows on you... she almost talks to you. I’m in love with her,” he laughs.
A significant investor, Saraf is currently the founder and vice chairman of Samena Capital, whose investments include Bloom Hotels, Virtus Medical Holdings and Softlogic Holdings in Sri Lanka, among others. He has previously been named one of Asia’s Top 25 most influential investors, and is a frequent speaker at conferences, including the World Economic Forum.
For a person who has made his fortune by following his head, not his heart, it seems strange to hear him talk about the yacht in such emotional terms. And yet, Saraf is not the first man to have fallen under the spell of this bewitching 46-metre beauty. Those who have spent time on board claim she has a soul – a spirit that’s easy to sense but hard to describe. “I have dreams of living with Elizabeth[Taylor] onthe Kalizma,” imagined former owner, the actor Richard Burton, “and never living on land again.”
Her story is certainly an intriguing one. “This was the most famous yacht in the world in the 1970s and 80s – more so probably than even Onassis’s !” Saraf exclaims with incredulity, recalling the many Hollywood stars who have come aboard in the past – from Clint Eastwood and Rex Harrison to Brad Pitt, who reportedly tried to buy her for himself – not to mention royalty such as Prince Rainier III of Monaco and Prince Phillip, Duke of
