RAISING THE BAR | AMI SHROFF, FLAIR BARTENDER
Ami Shroff says she was a wild child and always used to get into trouble at school. This trait and her fickle mindedness had her trying out several odd jobs after she graduated. In this experimental phase, she picked up flair bartending and it stuck somehow. Now she tends bars at events, clubs and parties, and is enjoying the tricks and choreography she does as she pours drinks. Shroff, who has been independently travelling across the city since the age of nine, claims she steers clear of newspapers and news channels to ignore what’s going on out on the streets and creates her own sense of safety. “Men misbehave in any profession. Once when I was tending in Bangalore, I stepped over the bar and a man grabbed me by my waist,” Shroff says. However, she brushes off these incidents with tact and civility just as she does the fact that there aren’t too many female bartenders. “It’s a male dominated field because when you associate the words bar and girl with each other, people in India are not okay with it,” she says. In her free time, the adventure junkie loves to travel and has even taken a mountaineering course that she feels helps her professionally as all such experiences do. This 28-year-old fireball has no plans of getting married. She intends to remain a free soul and keep her spirits up along with those of her customers’.