Among the Chatterati

by Kanika Gahlaut

Aby was a normal girl. And then an accident--a fatal one--made a society columnist out of her. But it takes a special kind of person to track the lives of the beautiful, the famous and the merely rich. They are the partying set--extravagant, bitchy, amoral, and always in your face. You mess with them at your own peril. Dazzled and disoriented, Aby follows overrated designers, narcissistic models, aging beauty queens, second-rung politicians and jealous fellow hacks through five-star Delhi. Somewhere along the line, she becomes a stranger to herself--till heartbreak sets her right again. Almost. Among the Chatterati marks the arrival of a spunky, intelligent and tremendously entertaining voice in Indian fiction. '...this is an important book. Society journalism is here to stay and a record of its development was long overdue. Gahlaut has done just that through this obviously personal account. Without any apparent agenda, she has written about the Page Three People (PTP) with tongue firmly in cheek--always remembering to take potshots at herself too.' -- The Indian Express 'Kanika Gahlaut's debut novel, Among the Chatterati...bowled me over with its spontaneous wit, its caustic irony identity, and steps into the realm of faction. Although it is at one level a real page-turner, it also looks deeper and more reflectively at the neuroses and anxieties of the famous and wannabe famous. The desperate narcissism of the partying set makes for topical social comedy.' --Namita Gokhale, The Times of India 'This is a book written breathlessly on the speedkeys, an artful ruse by a ruthless young debut writer who has managed to portray an airhead's passage through parties she was not born into with self-deprecatory sophistication and endearing cynicism...Aby, the hack and main protagonist of Among the Chatterati, is an endearing creature, with her hormones going berserk at the sight of Raghavendra Rathore's (renamed Ramendra Pratap Singh) royal chest hair at one party and chilling out with Feroze Varun in a dusk-filled backgarden in verdant Pilibhit...The action moves with deft speed--hotel rooms of lechy film producers, glitzy dos at megahotels full of inane models and wannabe actresses, exclusive drawing rooms of the self-confessed elite and the Jaipur Polo Ground are all Aby's wonderland.

Paperback

First published March 30, 2003

Reviews

[Ava · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first few chapters of the book were very readable and very interesting. By a weird chance, every book that I picked off the shelf from my library, for the past month or two, were very depressing. Which is why I picked this one. I was hoping it would be peppered with some light, amusing writing.

I was not disappointed there. It was amusing. A newbie journalist, Aby, gets thrown into the world of Page 3 reporting. We get a funny account of how she tries to handle this new assignment.

Kanika blends some fictional names with real life ones to add pep to the story. The Jessica Lal murder pops up the first thing in the book, thinly masked as the murder of an ex-model at a high profile party.

Aby also gets to date the delectable Arjun, scion of a royal family and also son of a cabinet minister.

About the time the Arjun episode starts, the story falls down a well. Well, there is no story thereafter, so to speak. Even the Arjun love affair is a bland report of some unexciting conversation, description of food eaten and restaurants visited.

The author launches into her categorization of the kind of people she finds in society gatherings, and no dope on what they do.

After a few descriptions of parties attended, the book whimpers to a stop with a tantalizing hint that Aby's love life is in a full swing.

What a sad end to such a promising start.