India's Bollywood elite turned out in force for a 60th birthday bash in the Juhu area of western Mumbai on Saturday night.
The birthday girl in question, Shabana Azmi, is almost as old as independent India, having been born just three years after the British Raj ended.
She comes from a prominent Muslim family: her father was a well-known poet and her husband, Javed Akhtar, is Bollywood's best-known lyricist and a member of the upper house of parliament. For the last two decades at least Shabana Azmi has been noted for her social activism.
Controversially, she starred in the 1996 film Fire, as a middle-class Delhi housewife having a sexual relationship with her sister-in-law. Rightwing Hindus were up in arms about it: her character was called Sita (also the name of a Hindu goddess) and to them a Muslim playing a lesbian woman called Sita was – well – a bit too much to digest.
But back to the birthday party. Amitabh Bachchan, Bollywood's biggest star and eight years Ms Azmi's senior, sent out a series of tweets as the festivities progressed. Here they are, in order. The last one reveals the reason for this article.
Tweet 1: At Shabana Azmi's 60th ... such joy to meet up with old friends and colleagues ... and listening to blaring 60's-70's music ...
Tweet 2: Javed Saheb at his humorous best ... in splits with his one-liners! Shatru, Vinod and I meeting after ages ... such nostalgia ... !!
Tweet 3: The theme for the party was 'wear a head gear' .. I mustered a Manali cap ... many did not comply ... Javed and Shabana spiked hair haha
Tweet 4: Javed Saheb's gift to Shabana – a cake designed like a slum!! Touché!!
A friend disgusted by this cake sent me a picture. I was appalled and needed to write about it.
The half-eaten cake is a baked replica of what a slum looks like to India's large middle class and its rather small elite. A river seems to run through it in blue icing but a careful look reveals it is a nallah or a sewage-filled open drain – the trademark of neighbourhoods where India's urban poor build their makeshift homes. A clothes line full of washing can also be seen among the remains of the cake.
Apparently, this was the idea of Shabana's husband, who thought it would be amusing. One gossipy blog says:
"Very few know that 'Jadoo' (as Shabana calls Javed fondly) has the best sense of humour in the industry. Since Shabana works closely for the upliftment of slums, her cake was just that! Javed Akhtar had Shabana's birthday cake designed as a slum: complete with huts, gutters and the muck. He even called it 'Shabana Nagar, Galli No 60'! Yes, because his wife Shabana was turning 60 years old."
I grew up in a very middle-class family in a small town in India and certainly did not spend much time in the slums. I recently spent the whole summer in India, my first after a decade of living in America.
To me, the contrasts between the super-rich, the world's largest middle class and the poor have never been greater. Most of the Bollywood stars who drove up to Ms Azmi's birthday celebration had no reason to pass Dharavi, Asia's largest slum with more than a million residents – though it's not far from their homes in suburban Mumbai. But even in elite Juhu, parts of which get flooded like the rest of Mumbai, it is possible to see the city's abject poverty from the tinted glass of a chauffer-driven and air-conditioned car.
The dissonance of my two months in India mirrored the dissonance of practically every other aspect of life in the world's largest democracy. While there I was also reminded that India is still home to a third of the world's poor. A study by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative using a multidimensional poverty index (MPI) found that there are 421m poor in the eight north Indian states of Bihar, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. This is more than the 410m poor in the 26 poorest African nations.
As I look at the picture of Shabana Azmi's birthday cake, I wonder about her husband's sense of humour.
I wonder if the irony was lost on most of the Bollywood elite, who dutifully showed up and no doubt ate big chunks from the makeshift huts and open sewage drains. I wonder, if they are aware of India's latest poverty statistics. I am sure the cake, like the rest of the food on offer, was delicious.
Some of these very same elites had been up in arms against what many activists called the "poverty porn" of Danny Boyle's film, Slumdog Millionaire.
The question is: is eating Shabana Azmi's slumdog cake while dancing to Bollywood music at a rather posh and expensive party not a tasteless representation of "poverty porn" yet again?
At least Slumdog Millionaire was a good film.