Kishore Singh: Shrinking degrees of separation

Whoever established the theory of six degrees of separation could not have guessed at its shrinking connections when it comes to our consumption of prurient crimes in high society. As the salacious details of the Indrani Mukerjea scandal play out in the media, it gives rise to a discomforting unease about how many of us play frequent footsie unnervingly close to gone girls and boys.

In Delhi and Mumbai, everyone knows everybody in a loop-the-loop that is useful when calling in a favour, but can prove claustrophobic to live by. So, on the only occasion we were introduced to the Mukerjeas, we could never have imagined that they might have been fighting over a missing person about whom no conversation was allowed. If acrimony is the reason for the former head of Star India to avoid a 'taboo' subject, then he is guilty of negligence beyond belief.
 

Whether it's the power elite, giddy-headed socialites or avaricious businessmen, you don't move around the rarefied circles of pelf and power without exchanging visiting cards, being cursorily introduced or nodded at with a sense of either familiar or faint recognition. That these encounters might include murderers, money launderers or other criminals with their silken charms are cloaked in fumes of single malt and cigar smoke. It's what makes cities like Delhi and Mumbai dangerous, where a recent acquaintance may turn out to be a fixer and the neighbour a felon. Social media has shortened those degrees of separation further. If you didn't rub shoulders with those who call the shots at the Gymkhana or at the President's tea, or with the glitterati over polo, then your child probably befriended their heirs on Facebook. At book readings or fashion shows, kitty lunches or film previews, our ever-expanding circles are finding us amidst people we don't really know but whose intents might be inimical to ours.

Friends of ours who we'd sometimes ask along to a soiree would want the famous, the infamous, the rich and the powerful pointed out to them, gladdening at the prospect of breathing the same rarefied air as those whose lives seemed more glamorous than our more mundane ones. But power and fame are a canker, something you only recognise the closer you glimpse the running of inner cartels from where the rank odour of adversarial relationships, contentious marriages, and carefully contrived social arrangements seems more diseased than successful. As their artificially layered lives play out in glossy magazines, desperate tales of cover-ups of children nabbed taking drugs in university dormitories, unwanted pregnancies and drunken car disasters reveal lives more sordid than triumphant.

Yet, middle-class neighbourhoods are aspiring to the desirability of clout and glitz, wanting to snatch a fistful of stardust for themselves. But life in a goldfish bowl can be frustrating, ranging from the insane need to splurge incautiously so that the paparazzi never catches one in the same pair of shoes, or repeating a bag, to needing to have unchallenged authority and limitless wealth, creating a vicious cycle of greed and avarice. As families increasingly isolate themselves, trading their children's upbringing amidst solidarity and affection for the disinterest of trainers and hired help, it would need more chutzpah than most to resist the temptations of what appears like a charmed life. But any flirtation with this unparalleled glamour extracts a severe price as so many in our midst are discovering. Which is why it is important to isolate oneself from the inducements of influence when, perhaps, the degrees that separate us need to be greater rather than less.