Who Gets the VIP Table at the Hottest Club in India?

Welcome to Thought Experiment Thursdays, where we think important thoughts about important things.

Life is hard. Sometimes, when I’m swiping through Instagram Stories of my friends raging against the 9-to-5 machine in a club on a Friday night, my leisurely scroll is interrupted by Taapsee Pannu. Her IG aesthetic lies somewhere between a person who thinks they’re pretty and one who thinks they should use their platform to make #realchange. Taapsee’s cool, so she does a little bit of everything—there are stories of her promoting various charities, interspersed with snips of her haircuts and #OOTDs.

This is the moment I put my phone down, stare at the ceiling of my undersized, overpriced room, and think of British horror writer Adam Nevill, who wrote, “After millions of years of evolution, we start stupid cults of celebrity and feed the egos of maniacs until they take our money, fuck us in the arse, and then cut our throats.” For the uninitiated, a celebrity is a famous person, but pure celebrity, is “the state of being well known”. Somewhere, somehow in the late 2000s, we began to care about famous people, and the media took a billion drags of that feeling, exhaling second-hand smoke into our beings. Websites were born out of covering parties, careers were made out of clicking pictures of people at the airport, and integrity was sacrificed at the altar of access. Social media, primarily Instagram from 2016-17 injected this culture into our consciousness via our primary source of information: Timelines. We now have access to what famous people are supposedly like IRL, giving them a ubiquitous presence in modern life. Everyone either now wants to be an influencer, or be with one. It’s all very uncomplicated.

In India, the people most ‘present to us’ are those in the orbit of Politics-Bollywood-Cricket, and some, like Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Sachin in the 1990s, become those entities themselves. To go back to Pannu then, in a post-Manmarziyaan world within the holy Indian triumvirate of Politics-Bollywood-Cricket, is a solid B-level celebrity. She’s in the second tier of relevant female actors, just behind Alia Bhatt, Deepika Padukone, etc, has no connection to cricket, but is surprisingly politically vocal. Now, if she were to walk into a club where my friends are hanging out, she gets to enter straight up. The drunk and the undrunk would scream her name, stomp over each other to get a selfie. And, after obliging the owner’s eager nephew, she will take her throne at the VIP table—the one true queen of the “Lamberghini” world.

But what happens if a B+ celebrity like Shraddha Kapoor were to walk in? Pannu gets stopped at the door, and Kapoor gets the largest space. If a B- celeb—think Hardik Pandya before his Koffee with Karan appearance—walks in, Pannu gets to keep the fiefdom, and Pandya net practices at a normal table.

Welcome to Thought Experiment Thursdays, where we talk about the real issues. Because, you see, the absolute, most sincere test of celebrity—be it the assholes from your college who occupy a table meant for eight with just two people, or real fucking famous people—takes place at the club. Who sits at the prized best table? Who gets the most jealous stares?

In India, peak celebrity, like real A+ level shit, is only achieved by a few who run the intersection of the aforementioned Politics-Bollywood-Cricket nexus. I’ve not so randomly picked them to be Narendra Modi, Virat Kohli, Priyanka Chopra, Sachin Tendulkar and Amitabh Bachchan. It’s all their world, and we’re just lucky to be along for the ride.

Now, what if all of them were to drop in at the latest, sexiest club in India, at the same time? They’ve sauntered in to chill after a rough week, and aren’t interested in banter, or sitting together. All they want is the biggest, most exclusive table, right at the centre of the joint—their ego won’t allow anything less.

Which leads us to our Thought for the Week: Who does the concierge give the VIP table to?

Most Indian kids growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, did so with an adage—that there’s this person who is, or should be, your father, and his name is Shahenshah. In terms of pure longevity, the dude has been a super famous human being for like 50 years. No one has sustained a longer run than Bachchan in the hearts and minds of the average Indian box office.

The problem is, Amitabh Bachchan isn’t a thing anymore. He’s failed to defy old age, especially with his use of technology, which is a key component of modern celebrity. The Shahenshah once asked Anushka Sharma on Twitter why she wasn’t replying to birthday wishes he sent on text. He also read out a letter to his granddaughters publicly on video. He captioned an Instagram picture “Shaded with colour…”, where the image was a black-and-white close-up of him wearing shades, which was the only thing in colour.

As far as being a moviestar is concerned, Bachchan’s last movie Thugs of Hindostan, was the film equivalent of lighting wads of cash on fire. His IMDb profile will make you cry. Even the usual backup, dozens of random ads (from promoting Indian states to men's baniyan), are failing. Last year, a jewellery company canned an ad with him and his daughter, because it annoyed some bankers. Another ad was threatened with litigation by a bunch of lawyers, for not wearing lawyerly garb correctly. The going hasn’t been great for Big B.

If he were to turn up at the club, the concierge would ask him to Google Map his way to the table. It won’t work well.

Priyanka Chopra’s celebrity has been a slow-burn, but in the last few years, she’s hit the A+ level i.e. the I-CAN’T-GO-A-WEEK-WITHOUT-HAVING-A-PRIYANKA-CHOPRA-CONVERSATION level. And no one knows how she did it.

PC isn’t traditionally attractive for large swathes of India’s movie-going men. (See: Ratio of light-skinned to brown-skinned Indian female actors). We also don’t always value acting as a talent (See: The Khans). And Priyanka’s a woman. We do not like them. (See: Ramayana, Quran, Indian men).

The concierge, if he’s smart, will be as confused as I am. Evidence suggests PC thrives in the chaos of our inability to understand her stardom. Not letting her in becomes even harder when you have to decline a location tag on an Instagram story which goes out to nearly 35 million people, more than Modiji and Big B combined. It’s THE social currency of the millennium, and Priyanka is richer than God.

But will PC have the patience to wait in line while the concierge decides? She’s bounced to American television when she got the chance, bounced from said television to movies when she got the chance, and even bounced with FAMOUS-IN-2008-BRO Nick Jonas after merely months of dating. While waiting in line, PC will get an invite to A Party In The U.S.A. with people with thicker accents and faker laughs, and leave.

In 2014, Modi shot himself up our veins. His omnipresence stretches from the poorest farms to the most expensively crafted drawing rooms. Heck my grandfather, who’s 80, partially blind, and can’t walk, brought up Modi in conversation two minutes into my first visit home in five months.

He rules Indian politics, has infiltrated Bollywood (See: Accidental Prime Minister release date, Akshay Kumar’s patriotism) and made Sachin Tendulkar sweep a street with an actual broom. And in terms of raw charisma, he’s peerless. Nay, all peers are made pappu.

If Modiji were to ask for a table, the concierge of the club will piss himself—of happiness if he’s a bhakt, and cowardice if he isn’t. But does Modiji then, walk through piss to get into the club, especially if it’s human and not cow piss? I don’t think so.

Pssst, don’t look, but Virat Kohli is on his way to breaking every Tendulkar record. Kohli also just won a series in Australia, something Tendulkar never did. He then married Cricket and Bollywood, adding a solid A- Anushka to his A, shooting him up the much vaunted A+ ladder.

It hurts to say this, but when Virat’s IG account is listed as one of the top 10 most expensive posts, is Sachin then just a poor man’s Virat? He’s well past the heights of his social capital, replaced by someone younger and brasher mixed with infinite sex appeal. The concierge will try to perhaps stop both of them, but Sachin will stand by and wait for Mr. and Mrs. Ambani to buy the bar. Just like they did at the IPL.

Virat? Dude DGAF. He’ll give the concierge the finger, and waltz right through.

Follow Parthshri Arora on Twitter.