Once an institution of warmth and wit, parties are now an embodiment of symbol over experience

For years, I stopped going to parties. This was not because I was suddenly virtuous. The ship of personal virtues has sailed. Perhaps the party - as an institution of pleasure, risk and wit - had died. And, yet, a few evenings ago, at a dinner hosted by Priyadarshini Scindia with entrepreneur Avarna Jain, I stood in the grounds of Gwalior's Jai Vilas Palace feeling the private thrill of a real party.

Pulao arrived in small earthen pots. The guest list made a glorious mix of designers and tycoons. And affection lit the long table stretching over a helipad. The palace - heavily Italianate, with long colonnaded facades and pedimented porticoes - was a dramatic backdrop, and I recalled the days when I did go out. And of why I stopped.

The original queen bee was Parmeshwar Godrej. At her parties in her sea-facing Mumbai villa, one met anyone from Richard Gere to Shah Rukh Khan. Though she was married to the dignified billionaire Adi Godrej, the electricity of those shindigs came from her own chutzpah, her social fearlessness and, above all, her great gift for storytelling.


Her parties were not shallow theatres of power but occasions for redistributing attention. An evening at her home did not reveal actors in search of producers, or heiresses in search of husbands, but a space where one person might be amplified in the wattage of another.

A host of equal footing was hotelier and art patron Raj Salgaocar in Goa. Raj was like a one-man jazz band: charismatic, generous, gracious, and so genuinely interested in other people that the real reason to attend his dinners was to bask in his luminous company. Yes, one might meet everyone from Kerry Kennedy to Sachin Tendulkar at his castle-like home in Dona Paula. But sometimes one goes to a party to meet a room, and sometimes to meet the host. Raj was that host.

The third in this pantheon was Roohi Jaikishan, whose ability to bring together artists, heiresses, writers - not as a parade of categories but as guests who might actually spark against one another - remains matchless. I've never eaten better than at her table, at a queen's feast, where you lingered not with ceremony but for the host's emotional generosity and psychological acuity.

What has replaced such hosts is not merely modern India's genius for bad taste. Zadie Smith observed that postmodernism marked the triumph of symbol over experience. Nowhere is that more visible than in the contemporary Indian party.

Around a decade ago, a peculiar strain of power contaminated the Indian social gathering. This was the party hosted by a billionaire determined to watch himself being watched. One did not go to such parties to feel anything but to stand inside a rich man's palace as a pawn. One also went to forsake all dignity. The social role was to clap, sing and dance for an autocrat. This was no longer hospitality but feudal PR with Dadar Market floral arrangements.

South Mumbai parties became engineered for circulation. Every image, guest and performance fed the larger impression of a celebration designed as 'content'. I also noticed such celebrations spread across months, geographies and headlines. This was not a show of festivities but an act of imperialism via social media.

Imperialism relies on a court. This one includes Bollywood stars who do cartwheels for cash, or production budgets. It also includes an emerging class of India's super wealthy who did not mind being bejewelled props in exchange for social currency.

Another sign of imperialism is a city's forced submission. Traffic is diverted, roads sealed off, and the public is forced to watch mutely as civic administration appears purchased by private money. Every rich man has the right to party: his money, his band. But now that show has devolved into a kind of exhibitionism: watch me excite myself.

The downside of such exhibitionism is that it confirms India's super-rich as both narcissistic and deranged. They need public applause to feel good about their private events. Worse, in a country marked by profound inequality, the display of wealth begins to look less glamorous and more obscene.

NSS data found 11.1% of indebted farmer households' outstanding loans were for marriages and ceremonies. These are the same people watching wealthy Indians codify ostentatious wedding celebrations as a cultural norm. This vulgarity is bad enough anywhere. But in India, it is dangerous.

By 2019, 50.2% of agricultural households were indebted. NCRB's 2023 figures recorded bankruptcy or indebtedness in 3.8% of all suicides, while 10,786 people in the farming sector died by suicide nationwide. A tax write-off pageant for the rich is a death trap for the poor.

And, so, the recent evening in Gwalior felt almost corrective. To see a palace lit in the shimmer of friendship, rather than in a glare of social compulsion. To experience the ease of friends assembled not to perform for power but to enjoy one another. All this felt almost, well, radical.

Perhaps another decade will pass before I go out again. But at least I was reminded that a party can still be an act of charm, rather than occupation.