'If anything has suffered in the last 60 years, it is formality'

INDEPENDENCE SPECIAL/ EXECUTIVE LIFESTYLE

Life on the cocktail circuit was all about keeping up appearances.

Sixty years of independence may not have given India a classless society (of course, it is debatable whether a classless society is achievable) but the barriers between classes in the upper storey of society are possibly less pronounced today.

Or, put simply, the nouveau riche or the arrivistes are more readily accepted in high society and hardly any brows would be raised in the social circuit at meeting someone who may not be able to distinguish the Chablis from the Chivas.

The contrast with the corporate cocktail circuit then and now couldn't be more marked. Call it a hangover from the rigid social stratification of the British Raj, but corporate socialising in the decades immediately after independence was largely an exclusive affair limited to a small circle of English-speaking sophisticates.

"One would expect only people of some social standing to be invited to the high social parties," recalls Russi Mody, former chairman and managing director of Tata Steel.

Mody (90), of patrician lineage (son of Sir Homi Mody, who happened to be the governor of Bombay Presidency and UP, and a member of the Indian Legislative Assembly) and educated at the English public school of Harrow and later at Christ Church, Oxford, would know how to interpret "social standing".

Parties came with a list of stringent dos and don'ts. Attire, for instance, was one clear indicator. Mody remembers that attending a cocktail party in anything other than an evening suit would be considered sacrilege. Certainly, "business casual" was unheard of in those days.

Not without reason. Attire would set the tone for the evening party, which without a doubt, was meant to be stuffily formal, with its own unspoken code of conduct of how one addressed whom and how one behaved. In fact, high society in those days was strung together by formality.

"People were formal at home, in their office and that naturally reflected in the parties as well." Mody recalls that everything in the early days after independence was pre-determined. "Even dates for young men and women were arranged," he says.

Formality wasn't just a big-city syndrome. It was the same everywhere, even in small towns like Jamshedpur, where Mody spent some significant years.

He joined Tata Steel in the thirties and climbed steadily up the ladder from a shopfloor trainee at Jamshedpur Steel Works to chairman and managing director. Naturally someone who has worked his way up would have experienced the different sub-groups in the class structure that existed then. More so for Mody, whose claim to fame is a man-manager par excellence.

And so, there were "upper storey" parties and there were parties for enjoyment in which young people participated. And enjoyment parties are pretty much the same as they used to be in those days.

But Mody insists that the tone and tenor of the cocktail circuit was not only set by the men who dominated corporate life at the time. Women played an important role in the social circuit by their sheer presence "" as they do now, he says.

"Their outfits and mental outlook...women were always in focus." They would even set the tone of conversation for men.

As Mody puts it, "Nowadays men don't care whether they are talking to a bunch of women or whoever. But people back then would care, they would choose the topic of conversation according to their presence or absence. Things have become slack."

That was then. But things have changed since. "If anything has suffered in the last 60 years, then it is formality," says Mody, whose own Hawaiian print bush-shirts in later years made an eye-catching variation to the monotony of suits and ties at office parties. In his 90th year, Mody feels it's inevitable and he is not averse to change at all, least of all a "formal" society.

"Personally, I prefer informality to formality. As a man, women have changed...the way they dress," he says thoughtfully. "Nothing is constant, only change...so, it's no use fighting against it," he continues.

Parties are just one aspect of social behaviour. Mody, who has, by his own admission, lived life to the hilt, is not one to complain. "Life must change. If there was no change then life would be uninteresting," he says.