Scraping the barrel

I just got invited to a Kate Spade party. I was tickled pink at the snobbery. Noticing this, I was met with an enquiring look by the man of the house. When I explained that I had an invitation to a Kate Spade luncheon, he said “Ah! That reminds me, have the tomatoes on the terrace ripened?” I was taken aback at this non sequitur, when it suddenly occurred to me that he thought I was going to dig mud with some woman named Kate.

I paused to ponder over the superficiality of the circuit I inhabit, even if only on the fringes, where your possessions or lack of them impact people's assessment of your worth.

Introspection makes me recognize that I am no saint and am also guilty of snobbery. For instance, I tend to maintain a distance from overtly religious people. 
When I was in my mid twenties, my parents had started panicking. There were no eligible prospects dangling after me. Meanwhile, I was happily wasting my time, or so my parents thought, participating in plays and working in a college. On the advice of a priest, my father decided to conduct a puja to remove obstacles in my path to wedded bliss. Luckily he didn't explain his motive to me. While I'm happy to let him practise his beliefs, it cannot be at the cost of my self esteem. My parents invited their friends who however knew that the ritual was to smoothen the way forward. I got to know the reason only after the priest came and insisted that I prostrate fifty times in front of the deity’s picture. I was ready to go ballistic but the discomfort on my mother's face checked me. I realized that she sympathized with what I felt and to reduce my embarrassment, she offered to prostrate along with me. So the two of us circumambulated around God's picture and kneeled down fifty times. I'm not sure it helped in any fashion other than to polish the already smooth floor. Everyone parted that night expecting to see me hitched in a year's time at the most. What they didn't know was that God didn't know how many days make up a human year. So he took his time settling all the other problems in the world but true to his word returned to solve my problem in exactly one thousand four hundred and sixty one days (one God year) give or take sixty-seventy days.

I am aware that being snooty about my lack of devoutness is similar to a religious person thinking his religion is better than that of another practising a different faith. It smacks of condescension and I'm working to change that, but it's still work in progress.

Meanwhile my dad also taught me a different kind of snobbery. He taught me that it was okay to politely disagree with people as long as whatever they said was grammatically correct and said with the correct accent. If the opponents didn't manage to fulfil the above criteria, heaping ridicule on them was absolutely fair game.

I expanded this worldview to include people whose intellectual prowess I did not respect or whom I disliked. I once had a classmate who, fed up of my verbal volleys exclaimed passionately “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you” I turned to her and very calmly said “I don't love you either.” In hindsight, it is obvious to me that what I was practicing was a form of bullying, disguised in my own mind as a higher art form.

There is an interesting sailor's story of the etymology of the word 'posh.’ The story goes that on the journey from England to India, the cooler side (away from the sun) and hence the more luxurious and expensive side went by the acronym P.O.S.H, Port out and starboard home. Assuming of course that your home was England. The story is probably false though it's a fun ‘fact’ to toss at people to make them think you are erudite.

Most people who know me have realized that I survive on a false illusion of superiority. Even I know now that I am scraping the bottom of the barrel on the snooty scale. My mother complains about my dishevelled appearance but I explain to her that it's the grunge look I'm perfecting. Meanwhile my peers peer down their Maui Jim sunglasses silently thanking heaven they don't manage to look quite as dowdy and if nothing else they at least own a Hermes bag or two.

Resigned, though still priding myself on being a grammar Nazi, I was brought down to earth by yet another snob who complained about my excessive usage of commas. I think I retrieved the situation somewhat by explaining that I spoke very fast and needed the commas to give me pause for breath. I left her clutching her sides either laughing at me or dealing with the body blow from the simplicity of my explanation.