The Dinner

It was one of those dinners that everyone was waiting for. Guru was known among his friends to host lavish dinners. It is so funny to believe that the best way to please a person is to satiate his hunger. A good food to counter one’s appetite would appease even the mightiest man’s ego. The best way to get a work done from a person is to offer him a sumptuous food and you can be assured of the rest. Good food still seems to be the most effective bribe.
Every dinner or lunch that is hosted will have a meaning associated with it. So did Guru’s. He was trying to please his client, Ric in the pretext of introducing him to the Indian culture. Guru had also called his close associates to dine along. The phrase “close associates” has a lot of inferences attached to it. If anyone can lift your face value, then he becomes your close associate. There were quite a few close associates in the dinner.
Guru was busy explaining Ric on how to eat a pani puri and advantages of using hands to dine. A sudden gush of patriotism spread all over him, when he explained these things to Ric. You must have noticed that most of us would revive our lost patriotism only when we talk to a foreigner and explain him things as though we represent the whole India.
As he was explaining this to Ric, he could sense that Ric was slowing losing concentration and was gazing at an awesomely beautiful lady. She was Sahana, Guru’s wife. She joined them to enquire if Ric liked the food. Wherever she went, she is known to leave a few curved lips behind. She was known for her elegance. There were a very few, who would find a reason not to like her. Theirs was a love marriage. A perfect couple who were admired cutting across prejudices.
Sahana married a middles-class cable operator, Gurumoorthy Subramanian. Then Gurumoorthy rose to become the CEO of a satellite TV and now Guru owns the most popular channel of India. It is worth observing that as a man’s popularity increases, his name shortens! Or is it the other way round?!
Though Guru hosted such lavish parties, he was an extreme introvert and so was Sahana. The changing trends and business demanded them to be social. Sahana was feeling totally out of place and was just gazing around to find anyone worthwhile to talk with. She could see gentlemen involved in what you would call male-talks and pretending to be intelligent. She could find a lot a ladies discussing on issues ranging from fashions, trends to stock markets. Lots of them were boozing too. She knew that not many in the crowd would be happy with people boozing around but still pretended to be comfortable. After all they have to reinstate that they are a social animal, you see! She knew that many were totally ignorant on many of the topics that were discussed but still made it a point to voice their views. They are here to display their intelligence and smartness, you know! She herself was not happy hosting parties of these kinds. She would prefer a quiet candle-lit dinner with her family to this one. So would her husband. But she needed to do this. Socializing was the ask of the day. She knew not a single person in the room were their own self. Everyone pretended to be someone else, someone smarter, someone cleverer. Everyone were wearing a mask, beneath which lay the real self. No one had the courage to throw away the mask and be their own self. The craving to be someone else had hit the peak now.
At the balcony, Vishal, her 8-year-old son, was too busy boasting to a kid how this toy gun was superior to the kid’s. She just grinned to herself on how much this attempt to socialize had impacted an 8-year-old. She suddenly noticed that she was not the only person observing Vishal. Guru was also observing him from another corner of the room. They smiled at each other realizing that the business empire they had built would grow leaps and bounds in the future in the safe hands of Vishal! With no one being their own self, the proceedings turned out to be grandeur!