A crash course in status

Seven days ago, the scion of a wealthy Delhi family, home on vacation from a Boston business school, took his friends for a joyride in his spankingnew BMW. After a night of high-spirited partying in a Delhi farmhouse with school friends, he drove his pride and joy through five pedestrians — not intentionally of course. He didn’t stop to stare at the broken bodies he had left behind. Instead, he rushed to a friend’s place and got the car washed of the ugly traces of blood and gristle. By doing this, he gave everybody who survived that ride a crash course in what constitutes real social status in a city where the aquifers of influence are constantly being recharged through daily transactions in the corridors of power.

So what is status? Let me count the ways it manifests itself. The right aftershave and designer label are necessary but not sufficient conditions to ensure the image of the arriviste. True, you must look cool and smell good, but anyone can acquire a bottle of Azzaro Pour Homme and winteractive garments from Gap. What’s more difficult to acquire is the old school tie and the new farmhouse a fashion accessory that has suddenly becomeextremely crucial if you want to fly. Farmhouses are not to be confused with farm houses those humble abodes of the rural poor that smell of cows and the methane they emit. Farmhouses are magnificent plots of suburban land, often illegally acquired, where people can party and be rich together.

Once you have a farmhouse, courtesy dad or a good friend, you need the right kind of wheels to match it. That’s where the Jaguar, the Merc or, as in this case, the BMW, comes in. When you ride one of these at speeds of 140 kmph, and when citiscapes melt like butter under the car’s knife-like precision, it’s easy to imagine that there is no one else out there on the streets but this car and its driver. Status has a way of depopulating the world.

This engenders a certain impatience with anyone who comes in the way. After the recent BMW crash, the friends of the young driver, with their expensive haircuts and cellphones, had gathered outside the courts. They were full of sympathy. Not for the families of the five menmowed down, you understand, but for their comrade in distress who had been so cruelly denied bail. There was a general consensus among them: those guys who got killed had really no business being there in the middle of the road. The subtext: it’s really quite unfair, these faceless types who suddenly die on us, whose grieving widows and sobbing children speak to newspaper reporters and TV channels.

Status also makes people impatient with silly things like traffic rules and regulations. In fact, status lies in your ability to circumvent its long-winded strictures and stipulations. You can do this in several ways.

First, you can pretend you didn’t do it by disappearing from the scene and getting the driver to wash the car. If this fails, you do the next best thing: unleash a battery of highly-paid lawyers, full of clever arguments, to plead your case. By the time they finish with their brief, they would have miraculously transformed the wrong-doer into the wronged. That’s why in Delhi the lawyer you hiresymbolises status as surely as a bottle of seventy-year-old whisky. Just the calling cards of some of them are enough to shake the citadels of justice.

Scott Fitzgerald knew this BMW lot and what powered them along. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made….