Sunil Sethi: The capital of rampant consumption

AL FRESCO

It is not quite midnight but the scene outside two deluxe hotels in Delhi earlier this week provides ample evidence that Delhi is on a fast-moving, fast-spending jamboree.

There are about a hundred guests milling about in the vast portico of each, either trying to get in or out, without the loss of a Fendi handbag or a Ferragamo shoe. The lineup of cars is six deep, many of them gleaming Mercedes or BMW, and stretches far down tree-lined drives out on to the main streets.

Inside, past gleaming plate glass doors, gone are the days of making a graceful, understated entry or exit. It is a scramble, as jostling hordes try to make their way to various points in the building. What is going on""an international conference, a state visit, or a minister's son's wedding ? Actually, it could be all the three. Delhi is just having another party. Night after night the scene is the same, with every hotel and restaurant packed like sardine cans.

The chattering classes are gorging themselves on delicacies such as quail in rich wine and raisin sauce, roistering under garden tables dripping with canopies of freshly-dyed orchids and thronging the bars with limitless supplies of liquor.

"Le Beaujolais noveau est arrive!" shouts one invitation this week""and wouldn't you know that it's the third Thursday of November when the wine presses in distant France annually uncork their fresh harvest?

If you live in Delhi, the undisputed capital of conspicuous consumption, you can learn something every day. The newly-issued Good Food Guide to Delhi and its suburbs lists more than 1,500 restaurants and bars. It now comes accompanied by a separate Leisure and Nightclub Guide.

On average, the price per head at a lavish dinner party at a five-star hotel is Rs 2,000. Hotel waiters may complain that they have been kept from a good night's sleep for months but hotel managers say they have never had it so good.

"Our banquet halls and public spaces are booked solid till the end of March 2005," says a manager, all smiles. "And," he adds with relish, "profits from food and beverage now run neck-to-neck with guest occupancy rates and often outperform them."

"Chanel Opens Early 2005" reads the bold announcement in one hotel shopping arcade. Just think back how the shape and style of the Indian hotel corridor has changed. Rapidly disappearing are the little shops that peddled Kashmir shawls, Jaipur enamel, Moradabad brass, and Assam tea to tentative tourists to be replaced by wall-to-wall Louis Vuitton and Hugo Boss.

Ravi Thakran, regional managing director of LVMH, the luxury goods conglomerate that owns a variety of brands from Christian Dior to Tag Heuer watches, has even classified the Indian consumer of luxury goods into four distinct categories: the connoisseur, the status-seeker, the young and fashionable, and the functionalist.

Old money, new money, funny money or even yummy money are, in fact, losing their social distinctions or purchasing power restrictions. Who after all would yearn for Nokia's new range of jewel-studded cellphones, priced between Rs 2.42 lakh and Rs 3.71 lakh a piece ? Going by Thakran's classification, at least three of the four in his listed species could be willing to fork out.

As if on cue, Calvin Klein, the world's unchallenged "King of Knickers", arrived in the capital last week to set the designer world aflutter.

The 62-year-old, Bronx-born designer""tall, reed-thin and with his lazy Uptown drawl intact""who's built a Fortune 500 company in designing and marketing everything from couture to underwear, was generous enough to swap ideas with a group of leading names from the Indian fashion world. It was fascinating to be present at the small, informal interaction.

What could have been a knowledgeable, worldly and sharp exchange of ideas about design, marketing, brand-building and going global, turned out, in fact, to be a one-way street, with the Indian group venting a number of complaints""from lack of capital to lack of backers among the fat cats of Indian industry.

Calvin Klein was sympathetic up to point. Their problems were no different, he said, from designers anywhere else in the world. He urged them to work harder to establish their niche markets and consolidate their brands.

India was too big and buoyant a market for them not to succeed. But when asked if the arrival of the Calvin Klein brand would squeeze them, he was blunt. "There's room for everybody. Choice is always good."

As competition warms up in the capital of conspicuous consumption, the customer simply can't have enough.