The summer holidays; a fierce, if not the fiercest social sport in the ‘rarefied’ salons of New Delhi…

…It was at the end of a debut post-pandemic revival of her legendary sit down dinner parties, for which she had earned a peculiarly strapping social identity in the upper echelons of New Delhi society – a city in which the scramble for relevance is incontestably far more brazen than in any other capital of the world – that she sat down at her desk in a kind of benumbed silence, reeling from the unyielding prattle which had polluted her ears over the course of several hours; needless to say, Indians are far better versed in the art of overstaying their welcome than they are in the disciplines of conversational etiquette, the latter unfailingly betrayed by a succession of overly exuberant and largely self-congratulatory monologues, in preference to any semblance of friendly, or equitable debate and dialogue…

…Each one of her 6 guests had arrived far later than that which qualifies as fashionably late, the pent-up frustration of having been ‘puppeteered’ for nearly two years, between confinement and curfew restrictions, giving rise to a wildly disproportionate defiance of both good manners and sense, any and all pretense of having found equanimity in isolation and enlightenment by virtue of self-introspection, forthwith abandoned in consort with the comprehensive restoration of former freedoms…

…The last of her guests appeared well over an hour after the time indicated on the message of invitation, sashaying unapologetically into the living room, clad in an outfit so grossly unbefitting of both the occasion and her form, the intent could not have been more painfully clear. “Well, what do you all think?”, she cooed, pirouetting on the spot at which she had come to a sudden halt, her one hand grabbing furiously at the hem of a short, white, vastly undersized body hugging dress, in an effort to keep it from climbing up the imposing pair of thighs it was evidently meant to subjugate, the other gesticulating frantically in the air by way of blowing kisses at whomsoever happened to be looking her way; in short, a perfect rendition of the affluent and upwardly mobile, middle class Indian woman.

As soon as the others had given their patently insincere approval of her attire, straining all too visibly against their own flagrant hypocrisy to which the lady in question was blissfully immune, she went on to reveal that her ‘get-up’ was part of a newly acquired wardrobe for her summer sojourn on the island of Capri, elongating the pronunciation of the letter ‘a’ to such an extreme, she might as well have been undergoing an examination by a doctor specialized in maladies related to ENT.

It was only a matter of seconds before the others – who up until then had been making pious demonstrations against all manner of conspicuous consumption, in light of the economic havoc wreaked on the masses by both the ongoing war and repercussions of the pandemic – sprang into action, bristling at the lady’s unforeseen lead; one by one they delivered soliloquys pertaining to their own respective European holiday itineraries, slinging names of ultra-exclusive nightclubs to which they had gained admission when not even intimate terms with a Russian oligarch could provide guarantee of entry, brandishing i-phones containing images of gilded invitation cards to A-list parties at the opening of the Venice Biennale, dropping names of the trendiest restaurants with six month waiting lists at which they had managed to secure reservations, and so on and so forth it went, as bottle after bottle of an unreasonably expensive wine was indiscriminately consumed, the import duty enhanced price tag of far more importance than the actual quality of the plonk, for which the majority of the people who dined at her table had little appreciation and virtually no taste… but alas, lest she be denounced for possessing a pedestrian palate and shallow pockets, the hostess had no choice but to participate in the same charade; after all, her fellow Indians could hardly be expected to subscribe to the idea that ‘less is more’.

It was now the month of July and after a hiatus of almost 36 months, Instagram once again abounded with expertly doctored footage of round one of the summer holidays, an unprecedented round two being boastfully announced, for there is nothing more compelling than the opportunity to participate in a game of ‘competing with the Kapoor’s’; humanism and philanthropic initiatives are most definitely no longer ‘de rigueur’…

…As Oscar Wilde once wrote,

“Society – civilized society, at least – is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef. And after all, it is very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees…”