Netherfield Ball – Le Monde’s Anniversary Bash, Oxford Bookstore

The party secrets.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

The woman in the yellow sari was a stunner — and she spoke like a Sciences Po professor.

One evening The Delhi Walla attended an event to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Paris-based daily Le Monde. With half-an-inch of prickly grey stubble covering his face, author Rana Dasgupta, who speaks in a strange international accent, held highbrow conversations with his French counterpart, the gray-eyed Florence Noiville.

Hosted at the Oxford Book Store in Connaught Place, a section of the audience got very serious. One lady was heard saying, “If you think of it, my relationship with my father and mother is also a political construct.” Another purred, “This is too dialectic.” At one point a melancholic-looking Frenchman briefly lectured on “the death of utopia” in response to a scrutiny of the “occupy movement”. Due courtesies were also paid to Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

In some ways this was probably the closest you could have got to the Left Bank without leaving Delhi.

And still you couldn’t help but feel sorry for the people in the back row who were forced to be a part of such intellectually-charged discourse when all they wanted was some trusty French wine.

Party with a difference