Gauri Sinh: Sweet!

It’s Parsi New Year today – celebration time for the city’s small but influential community. It amazed me, one time, to meet people from down South who actually didn’t know of Parsis.

Culturally, India is diverse, and a melting pot, but to have people cite ignorance of one of Mumbai’s vital communities, to me, was an eye opener. I proceeded to explain that wonderful story of their arrival on an Indian coastal town (as explained to me once by a dear Parsi friend) and requesting safe haven. When the Gujarati king, presenting a glass brimful of milk, said he had no space,  they illustrated by adding sugar to it. We’d be like the sugar, they told him — only sweeten your life, without disturbing it.

So the community was allowed to stay and build (and there were no conversions, as we all know) and they did indeed keep their promise to sweeten our world, going by the fact that many prominent names in social welfare and social responsibility here, are indeed Parsi.

While on the topic of sweetening our world, fashion seems to be putting in a fair effort in the city. As the nation agitates against corruption, the stylistas are perceived to be providing the soothe quotient.

And yet, fashion is anything but fluff, the world over.

Couture, especially bridal wear, is a multi-crore market in India, wooing the customer very serious business indeed. Biz honcho Anil Chopra would no doubt agree, after all, his company’s Mumbai week has appropriately been called ‘Winter-Festive’. Because, really, Festive is where the market lies for Indian fashion, never mind that we mightperhaps be staring at another recession. But let’s leave the drama of scary conjectures alone till they happen and concentrate on the drama of the here and now.

Which was ever present in the flamboyant Rohit Bal’s collection as he inaugurated the week, Tuesday night. It has been a while since I’ve seen the fashion world in its primal avatar, warts and all. That may be because many of our established names reside in the Capital and rarely show in the city anymore. Also because B-Town, bless their glamorous souls, have so overtaken fashion. But this show brought it all back for me. The adrenalin rush as the lights dim. The uber snobby front row, straining to catch a glimpse of the opening outfit as first strains of music waft though the semi-darkness.

The models, tottering out in six inches, sulky and simpering in turn. The nerves, the nautanki, all of it gloriously out there.

Bal of course does drama better than most. So Furilese, the Can Can, and Hindi numbers jostled for attention as thrillingly larger than life as his sweeping skirts with flower and peacock motifs (also shown at the Delhi couture week earlier) and the offsite setting, huge gajra filled baskets, sweetened air freshner, the whole nine yards. All this, and without B-Town too, save for muse (and former supermodel) Arjun Rampal, who sauntered on ramp showering gajra petals, wearing a ‘Hero’ Tee, the outfit maha-serious or merrily self-deprecating (of fashion’s obsession with Bollywood), we won’t know.

Many of the Delhi designer biggies present, off ramp and yes, the Mumbai frat too, including our air kissing fashion mag scribes, social lights and suchlike. It was Drama! Drama! Drama! all the way through. It was frou frou yet fundamental, irreverent yet gloriously relevant. It was the fashion world being itself, without reservation or apologies or indeed, B-Town favours. It was as it once used to be. It was like coming home.

This column was originally published on August 19, 2011.