Mumbai, June 13 -- Readers of this column will know how erstwhile tycoon Vijay Mallya has been the subject of many jibes on these pages. However, we, along with many others, were horrified that he had been heckled and jeered while exiting Sunday's India-Australia cricket match in the presence of his elderly mother (which emphasises how unpleasant the incident had been). Industrialist Harsh Goenka, not a great friend of Mallya's by any long stretch, was one of the first to post his condemnation of this demonstration of another kind of mob lynching, and we were happy to see that others like Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, one of India Inc's most respected leaders and a self-made billionaire, had been unafraid to speak up for him, publicly too in this instance. Mazumdar-Shaw's stout defense of her childhood friend (her father had been a senior executive with Vijay Mallya's father Vittal Mallya and they'd grown up as neighbours at one time) had come about because of an interesting reason. In response to her retweeting a picture that Mallya had posted from the stadium a follower had thought he could embarrass the industrialist by outing the fact that she'd been in Mallya's company during the match. But Mazumdar-Shaw would have none of it. "He is my friend and always will be," she had replied firmly, putting the troll in place. As for imagining that one can bring the toxicity and negativity of Twitter on to the streets and in real life while jeering and jostling a man who is escorting his elderly mother? Even Mallya's harshest critics would say that's just not cricket....