Column | Netflix series Class shows that when it comes to depicting crazy rich Indians, our imagination fails us

A still from ‘Class’, adapted by Ashim Ahluwalia from the Spanish series ‘Elite’.

The latest OTT sizzler is  Class from Netflix — a heady cocktail of hot youngsters, hot sex and hot-button social issues.

It’s a fairly faithful remake of the hit Spanish series  Elite. And that’s where it occasionally stumbles. At one point, the rich teenager sneaks her poor lover, a bit of a ruffian, home at night after a party. Her brother smuggles in his female classmate as well for a post-midnight swim in the pool.

What’s utterly astonishing is that nobody sees them. The home is palatial but there seems to be hardly any staff. That’s the issue with remakes, said my partner who binges on all kinds of OTT series. In Spain, it’s believable that even the wealthy have few full-time staff. In a Delhi home of this kind, there would be 24×7 security guards. Someone or the other would have woken up to open the front door. They would have to step over a couple of people sleeping in the living room. Later, the lover leaves the teen asleep in bed and tries to break into the safe. He wanders from room to room and still never runs into a soul.

I was reminded of a friend visiting a very wealthy business family in Kolkata. She said there was one person whose only job seemed to be to answer the landline. ‘Landline answer- wallah’ became our code word for über privilege. It’s a detail that I would never have been able to dream up as a writer if I had not heard of it first-hand.

The basic problem is that we have a much easier time writing what appear to be realistic accounts about the lives of the poor and the lower middle class. They are already the subject of academic studies and award-winning non-fiction books. Also, they have less choice when it comes to being put under the sociological microscope. But the ultra-rich have no incentive to let us know exactly how many layers of security envelope their everyday existence. They live in a world so walled off from most of us that we might as well be imagining life on the moon.

A still from ‘Class’.

So we come up with caricatures like  Class where a school-going teenager is suddenly appointed director at his father’s company. A Delhi friend rolled her eyes saying even the most duffer business scion is sent abroad to get some kind of MBA stamp first. The botox-ed mother just drinks cocktails from the moment she gets up because that’s what we imagine the rich and idle do all day. When the school boy shows up at his friend’s home in the morning, that too on a school-day, he’s offered a whisky the way other families might offer a Coca Cola.

As Indian markets opened up, the attitude to wealth changed. It is no longer something to be kept under khaki wraps. It is okay to flaunt it. But most of us only get a glimpse into the rarefied world of that kind of wealth when something like the very big, very fat Indian wedding happens at the home of some industrial tycoon. 

A wedding planner once told me about a wedding he organised at the Falaknuma Palace, where the mandap was made with 80,000 roses and every tenth rose had a Swarovski crystal pin embedded in it. The whole event was captured with 15 cameras and then screened for family and friends later at a movie theatre. But that’s just special occasion bling.  Class is supposed to be about the daily lives of the very rich. That’s where our imagination fails us.

British historical drama series ‘Downton Abbey’ (2010-2015) depicted an early 20th century aristocratic family living with a retinue of servants in a country estate.

In the episode where the poor student visits the rich girl’s home, he asks in amazement whether just four people live in the enormous mansion. She says yes. That would have been the perfect moment to show an army of maids and cooks and security guards flitting about the house, staff who live there and yet are never counted among the residents. But nothing like that happens. This is not Robert Altman’s  Gosford Park, a murder mystery set in the upstairs-downstairs world of masters and servants, or  Downton Abbey. The staff keeps these mansions running but here the staff also gets in the way of the plot.

Despite all that,  Class is a fun binge. The performances are good. The cast is eye candy — clearly there are no overweight rich people in this corner of Delhi. The whodunnit storyline is entertaining. It ticks off a lot of issues, many of them tailored to an Indian context: Hindu-Muslim relations, hijab, homosexuality, caste, class, Kashmir, toxic social media, drugs, teen pregnancy, police brutality.

But  Class shows that when it comes to depicting crazy rich Indians, Houston, we have a problem.

The writer is the author of ‘Don’t Let Him Know’ and likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.