View: It’s not fun and glory for the super-rich living in the global south
Clearly, the man had thought about this quite a lot, to the point of harbouring the kind of concern that people with less money and thinner mattresses keep hidden under their mattress. His reply was honest and disarming. 'It's like driving' — what he meant was 'being driven in' — a Porsche on pothole-ridden roads. Everywhere I go, I'm admired and resented in equal measure.' I honestly expected him to say that India was no longer a poor country and quote the likes of Surjit Bhalla. His candour impressed me.
Being very, very rich in a poor country — poor being not so much in abstract, theological GDP terms, but in its look, smell and feel — has its unique pressures. One would think that it would be more comfortable being super-rich here, like Napoleon hanging out with seven dwarves. But it turns out that it's more like being Beethoven at a jagran.
Hosting social events can be ameliorative. Luckily, we live in an age where the super-rich genuinely feel comfy dressing down, while the educated middle-classes no longer find blinging up to be in poor taste. The rest is taken care of by banter — latest Netflix 'drops', Trump vs Kamala, the last vacation, what wine to have with which cheese...
But the very rich can throw lavish dinner parties in their mansions, complete with imported Pule cheese (made from the milk of Balkan donkeys in Serbia) and champagne harvested from the tears of French nuns, and still no amount of blackout curtains and soundproof walls can insulate them from WLO — What Lies Outside. And the
