Pune and Paris…Hilton

Paris Hilton was in Pune on a Monday, this Monday in fact, and if that fact is like, totally awesome, there’s more. What had she come here to do? Well, to party of course, and if you didn’t know that was a verb, you so have to get a life, you know? As to whose party was it, it was obviously someone very rich, for you couldn’t have made a white, super-celebrity with the name of a famous city travel over 24 hours to reach a party for love alone. I mean, it had to be for money! Probably lots of money, or as they said in my mother’s generation, pots.

And…wait…Salman Khan and Mika were at the same party. AND they danced the night away with Paris, giving her a giant diamond necklace in the shape of a Sikh emblem at the end of the party, which has been duly documented on Twitter and Instagram by Paris herself. So if you aren’t already dumb with stupefaction at all this news, just know this – the birthday boy who enabled all this was the scion of a leading poultry, last seen picking up a British football club, one of the only five clubs to have won the Premier League, which was relegated to the boondocks outside the League under his company’s ownership.

If the rich poultry scion wants to have Paris dancing at his birthday, well, he can have her brought here, as Monday showed. It also showed that there’s a new kind of obscenity around us today, the kind enabled by ‘Dushman ke chhakke chhuda den, yeh Indiawaale‘ lyrics, and ads on TV for paan masala that show a gutkha tossing gentleman buy a heritage property from a sneering white auctioneer for his dad.

Is it being delusional and stuck in a post-colonial warp if one finds the partying of Paris in Pune not such great news? Shouldn’t I be rejoicing instead at the new purchasing power of the Indiawaale, who can buy anything, afford anything from anywhere in the world, with cash – that too, flung in the faces of their competitors from the used-to-be-developed world?

No, I am sorry, I just can’t join these celebrations or be too amused by the gushing reports in the newspapers that now describe the chocolate moustache that a Hollywood actress developed after drinking chocolate milk on a film set.

I turn the pages of the papers and read about how the hills around Pune are being taken over by greed and concrete, due to builders who have politicians comfortably in their pockets and are only a few crores away from fetching Paris or her cousin to another party.

I sit in an auto on the way home from office and watch an old lady spread her polythene packets and newspapers on the pavement for the winter night.

And the obscenity hits me.