The Party Proletariat

Parties have an intrinsic charm. It's some place where you can be oblivious of your purse. There is absolutely no need to dispense with your flush notes or to flash your credit cards around. And, there is no end to the delicacies you can gorge upon.

There is also an intrinsic competitive urge to taste, if not to devour, all the delicacies on show. You feel if you have not tasted all you are a poor loser. You change your habits too.

If you take tea only, and you see coffee being served you instantly free yourselves of all inhibitions and start relishing the pristine taste of coffee.

If you are a strict no-no to hard liqueur you feel the spirit of participation turning you on compulsively. If you drink, but your brand is not there you can do with any available.

If you are a vegetarian and cannot come out of your dogmatic beliefs you can only glower at all the vegetarians who throng veg. counters too for the fear of being declared a loser. Some vegetarians are smarter. They accept their affair with the non-veg food as a one-night stand.

Sometimes there are surprise parties. You attend some normal events or shows, and at interval, you discover freebies offered lavishly. You make a mad rush to get a safe place in the serpentine queues. If you manage to bring up the rear only you live in constant trepidation. The stocks may end anytime and you will be labeled a loser.

Well, if something is offered free you must manage to get a huge share. Otherwise you are a poor loser. And nobody wants to be a loser.

The long queues always disturb you. You glower at your fellow party animals muttering, 'Goddamned suckers! You get nothing to eat at home or what!' Once you get the platter on hand you just do not want to take any kind of risk. You 'upload' your plate with huge quantities of every possible item totally irrespective of what you can 'download' eventually.

We are not sure whether Sigmund Freud had ever dealt with this universal human party behavior or not. Maybe that time there were not enough parties to justify such an analysis.

In modern times big international events like film festivals, conferences or seminars are happening all the time and no event is meaningful without dinners or parties. The attending delegates are always focused on 'managing' the passes for parties rather than on doing what they have come for. This is such a prestige issue that they are ready to go to any extent of cajoling, entreating, beseeching, begging, enticing or bribing the pass issuing executives. Once they are laden with all the passes for all the dinners during the event, only then, they look around to examine the purpose they have come for.

Well, if you fail to 'manage' passes for free parties you are the worst and the utterly useless human creature polluting this planet earth.

When there are contributory parties you try for My Contribution Optimization (M.CO.). You strive for the maximum gastronomic benefits that can possibly be 'uploaded' to justify the hard cash you have paid.

The most fundamental lesson we learn from the party experience is that parties, like the French Revolution, are based on liberty and equality alright, but we are not very sure of the 'fraternity' phenomenon. Parties are totally devoid of class or creed bias and the 'bourgeois' division. It does not matter how much dough or credit cards you carry, what dress you wear, what company you keep and what background you belong to. On the party day you are an equal and you behave the same quintessential way as all the others. You can wholeheartedly participate in the free-for-all rampage and try by all means not to be labeled a poor loser.

This tremendous 'party psyche' of the homo sapiens needs to delved into by the experts to give us more lucrative details and tips so that we can walk royally into parties and enjoy totally.

So then, happy partying!