The sacred & the profane, writes Nina Pillai

The battle lines are drawn, a Lakshman Rekha that’s rarely crossed, the ladies who lunch a closeted group that hunts in packs. 

Like every pack there is a leader and maybe even a co leader and the rest of the pack, they closely guard their secrets, their lifestyle and gossip. Keeping up with the Joneses is now a spectator sport — every participant desperate to out do the other in the clothes, jewellery, shoes, bags, travels, partying, homes and last but not least, their surnames, which they flout with more pride than their Prada.These marauding gangs in their designer finery, are forever desperate for the fall of the next foot soldier.They are ruthless when one of their own fall. 

Suburban women have a mix of star power, wealth and familiar surnames, the urban ones old wealth, surnames that have survived generational shifts and inherent power that comes with it. Blond locks, sunglasses, head-to-toe chic designer look, and an ego is ‘de riguer’ for both clans. They are territorial and don’t deign to cross into the others terrain except with the pack in tow. Like the Queen Bee, her followers are clones who look and behave like her, and they support each other’s causes, be it an exhibition, a launch or a charity event, but wouldn’t be seen dead at the other’s event.  

The brat packs are like in a heaving, pushing, grunting rugby game where the winner gets all, but all of what? That's the moot point. It’s a marginal game being played by women who should have evolved by giving back to society, setting themselves up as examples to the youth yapping at their heels. 

Delhi, on the other hand, has a power divide, the women cling to anyone even remotely associated with the politicos of the time. As one can imagine the heave-ho of the recent general elections have left many of these Hunger Games contestants on the wrong side of the fence, being shot at by the others on the right side who waited and watched from the sidelines for over a decade and now have their pound of flesh. Women bond at kitty parties which stretch from dawn to dusk. The grand old dames of society guard their power positions with hawkish zeal, the younger lot playing like kittens in their shadows.

Finally, it must be said as I am suburban in Mumbai but urban in New Delhi. I don’t bother to bridge the great divide but merely do my own thing as I have been there, done that.   

That both Delhi and Mumbai have that vibrancy is a given, it’s the substance I worry about as they rarely are achievers in their own right. They must all take gigantic leaps for womankind by evolving again and again and reinventing themselves.