Kishore Singh: Welcome to the do-gooders' club

On Sunday, an executive from CRY, a charity to which I’ve donated in the past, sends an executive gate-crashing into the house insisting I help him meet his target. A day later, a persistent representative from Oxfam refuses to get off the phone despite my saying I’m in a meeting. And here I am, on another morning, having coffee and a tête-à-tête with someone who insists on being recognised for her charity while being better known for her outfits and jewellery.

“You ask her about that,” my wife insists, when I tell her I’m meeting socialite Meera Gandhi ahead of a fundraiser in the capital. Meera, say this for her, isn’t apologetic about those baubles. “I’ve never known a man who loves buying his wife as many trinkets as my husband” – Vikram Gandhi, famously of Citibank – “does”, and Meera, true to form, is draped in expensive strings and stones. She is unabashed about being wealthy, with “homes – townhouses, apartments – all over the world”, New York, New Delhi and Dubai included, one of which had once belonged to Eleanor D Roosevelt. Her “girl friends” include Hillary Clinton and Cherie Blair, about whom she giggles she’d seen the cross side on her first non-official visit to New York immediately after Tony Blair shifted out of No. 10 Downing Street.

“Name-dropper,” hisses my wife, when I tell her about our meeting, “social climber.” “She did say,” I confess to my wife, that because of her husband’s job, they meet a lot of “influential people”, but ever since she’d launched her Giving Back foundation, those outings on the social circuit have only increased. So it is true that she surrounds herself with people who wear their emeralds and their social ambition on their sleeves? “Of course,” Meera laughs heartily, “but what matters is that they pay $5,000, or whatever, to attend the Christmas Ball. You don’t pay, you spend your evening away from the paparazzi, alone at home.”

It is this American style of philanthropy that the Gandhis are hoping to encourage among India’s givers and shakers. In so doing, she wants to remove the suspicion non-governmental charities evoke in this country. She makes herself available for various girl child charities where she’s happy to let inmates play with her “Chanel bag”, her “lipstick with a mirror attached”, telling them about the goodies of the material world instead of distantly asking them about their well-being and health.

It might have been opportunistic except Meera got Vikram to pledge a rather large sum for setting up the foundation — the figure, which she doesn’t want publicised, is enough to make anyone gasp, yet she says that they’re “constantly topping it up”. “We have a lot of money — more even than a lot,” she says, and inspired by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, she’s found a way to give back some of it, spending a considerable time and energy on these activities that have made her a “sort of celebrity” in, especially, America.

Getting ready to attend the Delhi fundraiser, my wife says, “I hope she isn’t going to ask us for our money.” It is about giving back, I remind her. “Then she can give back to us,” says my uncharitable wife. During the course of the evening, having stared rudely at her “Rs 14-lakh necklace”, my wife is as happy as she’s likely to be about “society’s do-gooders”: “Meera said she’d like us to drop in at their Eleanor Roosevelt House,” she tells me, “which I plan on doing as soon as you can donate a ticket,” she pauses, “to my cause.”