Vijay Mallya's last stand : Selling his crown jewel United Spirits Asha Rai & Boby Kurian, TNN | Nov 10, 2012, "I feel sorry for him" or "he has my sympathies" are not the phrases you would ordinarily associate with as flamboyant a person as Vijay Mallya. But, indeed, they cropped up often when talking to a large number of people who have known him personally and professionally for this story. Sympathy that less than two weeks after publicly, almost defiantly, proclaiming that he would not sell family silver to fund his grounded airline Kingfisher, he had to do precisely that. A sense of sorrow for a man who has been felled by hubris. Or, as an associate memorably put it, through "nasha." Mallya was always a high-stakes business operator. He built the liquor and beer businesses he inherited from his father, the late Vittal Mallya , at the young age of 28 in 1983, not only into dominant market players in India but in the case of the...