Faith in fakes

People lie about the silliest things. Like the dinner that "Bobby spent the whole afternoon in the kitchen rustling up", our hostess told us - not being able to claim cooking as one of her own special skills. Serving up a homecooked gourmet meal is fast becoming one of the musts of the social set, but it needs to be bespoke rather than curated - the latter consisting of food supervised by, but not actually cooked by the sahib or memsahib. Which means you can no longer get by issuing instructions to the cook instead of getting sweaty in the kitchen yourself.
 

The jetset no longer compete over holidays as much as over kitchen knives. Gym and club memberships are old hat; conversation starters now are about flat-bottomed or round-bottomed woks; and if you don't know your quinoa or sorghum, you have as much chance of being a social success as you have of being invited to 7, Race Course Road for dinner. If you can only manage Burmese or Thai, you've a long way to go to catch up with Mamata and Anil who do Sudanese cuisine, and who'll score brownie points swapping notes with the Malhotras over critical differences with Ethiopian cooking. French is old hat, but Vietnamese French passes muster, and Creole - not Mexican - is the flavour of the season.

Problem is, cooking at home is no Masterchef reality show, so it's much easier to order from the takeaway next door but hide away all evidence - bills, telltale garnishes, packaging - and Google all relevant information so you can brag about the cous-cous being more difficult to make than a risotto, and whether emu eggs take longer to cook because they have more fatty content than a chicken's egg. And if all you have to show for your labours is kadhai chicken and kali dal, then you might as well be in culinary purgatory - which is why we couldn't understand why Indy tried to pass off Deez biryani as his own, but served it in the handi in which it was delivered.

Nor is food the only sleight-of-hand practised among Delhi's glamourati. For years, they've poured local hooch into their decanters, but passed it off as expensive scotch. A "spontaneous" dinner invitation in all likelihood is an opportunity of getting rid of leftovers from the previous night's party - to which you weren't invited. A curious fact about these leftover parties is that neither host nor hostess claims to have actually cooked the meal.

Or take Sarla's daughter's lehnga which, far from being a "Ritu Kumar original", isn't even a "Chandni Chowk original copy" but was probably replicated by Padmini's masterji for a fraction of the cost. More brides today brag about being kitted out in Ritu Kumar trousseaus than the couturist has probably created in her lifetime. My wife insists she has friends who snip labels off their old clothes to have them tailored on to Lajpat Nagar clones by Raju, the neighbourhood "repair-wala" tailor, who is usually discreet about such transgressions. His clients are the same lot who apply their own make-up but claim it was done at a celebrity salon. Or will have their hair blow-dried and set at a parlour but insist that it's "naturally wavy". As for Bobby who allegedly cooked the Moroccan lamb that came from a restaurant, on the rainy afternoon in question when I called him, this is what I heard him instruct his Man Friday, "I'm going jogging, so get me my Nikes - the fake ones, I don't want to get the originals dirty."