Move over Louis, there is a Fat White Lady working your corner on the streets of New Delhi.
The AP reports that “Cocaine May Be the New Status Symbol in India”.
Says Kiran Bedi, good cop extraordinaire:
“Cocaine is expensive. You’ve got to have money for it, and now more people have money. It becomes a matter of keeping up with the Joneses.”
Among all the things that it is, it is another great example to add to the Class Matters series The New York Times did last year of how the material ways once used to define class have both changed and stayed the same.
And though I would argue that the social ripple effects of designer handbags and addictive stimulants are decidedly different, I suppose there is some parallel between Louis Vuitton and Lady Caine.
Even though…
Only a tiny percentage of Indians are believed to have tried the drug.
I’m no mathematician but I would argue that small slices of a billion is still a lot of people.
Perhaps the greatest line of the AP Wire comes when a high-flying twenty-something banker at an elite New Delhi country club asks not to be named…
“…for fear of India’s stiff anti-drug laws and “my mother-in-law…”
…illustrating in one more shining example that, even among the wildly successful and jet-set, hell hath no fury like an Indian parent shamed.
